this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
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Microblog Memes
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A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
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Ok, I respect your position even if I don't agree with it.
Mainly because this definition is so broad, it becomes in my opinion worthless. Everything is a cultural artifact. The sharing of anything is therefore a spreading of culture. The Internet is strictly speaking the sharing of resources. Every. Single. Thing. Everything on the entire publically accessible internet is a meme. Every word out of your mouth is a meme. Anything you've ever done which has been observed by another is a meme.
At that point, it's not interesting or IMO valuable as a conceptual tool.
I'm not telling you you're wrong, just that your definition (in my opinion) steals a word which could have been a compelling descriptor and makes it less valuable.
You’re not at all wrong and I think that’s one of the many reasons why memetics has been widely criticised. I think it had its place in the 70s while selfish replication / kin selection was being explored and popularized but I think it’s been widely discredited at this point.
I know I was arguing the definition of a term but I’m truth, I don’t personally subscribe to the overall theory (Dawkins did write the book almost half a century ago at this point!). The “meme” is a bit of pseudoscience to vaguely articulate the propagation and proliferation of ideas/culture.
You should check out The Social Conquest of Earth if you’ve not already. It doesn’t have a compelling descriptor but it does shine a light on how natural selection doesn’t take place at purely the gene level. In a sense, we shouldn’t focus on the unit of the meme but instead the mechanisms around it.
I’ve really appreciated this little debate; you’re clearly a bright person!