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Sunday, May 20, 2012

Memes

 La Sala de las Memorias


The theory of Memes is sort of an important paradigm of our Age and Society. Wikipedia defines the Meme as:
"an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture." A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures.
giving the impression that Memes are alive and potent, and we humankind are sort of a mushy blue-algae laying in tidal pools waiting for a break, or an idea.

I have not heard a good explanation of how the neural patterns of one brain are placed in a  packet, placed in the outgoing mail, meets up with another brain, handshakes, then decides to change into something more comfortable in its new digs.
Nor does it explain the old experiment of ten people telling each other a story consecutively, then at the end of the storytelling, seeing how the story mutates in the process: memes seem to degrade quickly.

In a sense, Language would no longer be a form of articulate contact, but rather a means by which one person deposits their "meme-sac" into a different receptive person in an act of meme-congress. So all that time spent debating and learning vocabulary and how to write well is no more than a male squid's pseudo-pod...

Our eyes, once the windows to the soul, are closed by Meme theory, and replaced by mute semaphores of dilation and contraction.
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