First of all this is an ad hominem. How did it get to the front page of HN? There is a streisand effect at play here and game theory stuff. This "begs the question," what is a meme? I hope someone will "expand on it." Explain it to me as though I were five years old. It was too long to read.
Folklore (including Jokes) is itself a branch of Anthropology.
Dawkins' work examining Memes as "simplest unit of an idea" within an "evolutionary context" initially seems like a throwback to the early 20th century practice of lets apply Darwin's natural selection to everything! And this was largely how social scientists interpreted it.
However, as a model within the study of Folklore, it is fun to trace what jokes and stories move between which communities, and how they mutate along the way. A minimal understanding of Social psychology adds a new depth to such "joke maps", and how they affect the popular mindset. Studies actually correlating large swaths of these to history are sorely missing.
Its too bad we dont really have Folklorists mapping memes across topic/region specific communities such as groups of subreddits or facebook groups/pages - this would be a goldmine to potentially redeem or actually refute Dawkins' ideas in a more concrete manner.
But this makes for several problems: reverse engineering the "joke" would make for one hell of a propaganda tool.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 28.3 ms ] threadThe same can be said for jokes. Jokes are everywhere. But where are the theories behind them?
Dawkins' work examining Memes as "simplest unit of an idea" within an "evolutionary context" initially seems like a throwback to the early 20th century practice of lets apply Darwin's natural selection to everything! And this was largely how social scientists interpreted it.
However, as a model within the study of Folklore, it is fun to trace what jokes and stories move between which communities, and how they mutate along the way. A minimal understanding of Social psychology adds a new depth to such "joke maps", and how they affect the popular mindset. Studies actually correlating large swaths of these to history are sorely missing.
Its too bad we dont really have Folklorists mapping memes across topic/region specific communities such as groups of subreddits or facebook groups/pages - this would be a goldmine to potentially redeem or actually refute Dawkins' ideas in a more concrete manner.
But this makes for several problems: reverse engineering the "joke" would make for one hell of a propaganda tool.