I think, for the time being, that I will post excerpts from my book as I write it, rather than posting entire chapters or sections. That way it will be more fun when the whole thing comes out all done. In this section, I go into talking about the game “telephone” also called “Chinese Whispers” and talk about how that sort of modification occurs very commonly when stories are told and retold. The chapter is largely based on concepts fleshed out from an older blog post about how stories are modified by transmission. Over the course of this, I contrast that approach to the field of memetics, since that also deals with transmission of information. This is what the following excerpt is about (this is also based on an older post of mine).

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The emerging field of memetics attempts to describe a similar phenomenon in the dissemination of ideas, but from a rather different perspective. These theories, popularized by sociobiologist Richard Dawkins, suggest that ideas, or memes, act almost like viruses which seek to replicate by passing from mind to mind via human communication channels. The term memeplex is used to describe a group of memes which have joined together in a symbiotic relationship, and are usually transmitted as a group. The idea is that by transmitting themselves as a group, they are more likely to be remembered, and thus replicated through communication. There are some interesting aspects to this theory, in terms of information as having a purpose all unto itself. But I disagree with some of the fundamental assumptions of memetics, as a discipline.

Primarily, I dislike the metaphor of ideas as being sort of “thought-viruses.” The ultimate conclusion of this line of reasoning, for me, is that thought itself is nothing more than a disease. This seems to imply it should be eradicated, or at least treated. By casting ideas as contagious viral-agents, we also start to remove human responsibility from the equation. Meme, to me, is also a needlessly abstract term. No one has ever seen or heard a meme. I prefer to use the term story because we are all intimately connected to stories; we understand them implicitly from the time we are little children. Finally, memes are popularly described as being “replicated” into new host-minds. Memes are viewed according to their success rate of replication. This idea of replication largely ignores the mutative and easily witnessed Telephone Effect.