Page 143 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

Meme The idea of a meme was originally coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard
Dawkins in the 1970s to act as a conceptual bridge between genetic theory and
cultural theory. Subsequently the term has been taken up widely by other writers
120 and one can now reasonably talk about ‘meme theory’. A meme is said to be the
smallest cultural element that is replicated by means of the human capacity for
imitation. Memes are cultural instructions for carrying out behaviour stored in the
brain and passed on through being copied. Human consciousness itself is a product
of memes so that each of us can be described as a massive memeplex (group of
memes) running on the physical machinery of the human brain. The broad
implication of meme theory is that cultural change takes place as a consequence of
memes doing their own thing independently of human ‘will’.
Examples of memes would include the wheel, the alphabet, particular tunes or
musical phrases, clothing fashions, books and ideas like ‘God is dead’. The
reproduction of a particular meme is not necessarily best for human beings, rather,
memes are replicated simply because they can be. That is, a successful meme is one
that is continuously imitated. This reproduction is advantageous to memes rather
than to human beings per se. Memes replicate independently of genes so that meme
theory is not best understood as a form of genetic reductionism. The general
development of language and our capacity for endless talk may be an outcome of
the explosion of memes rather than of biological advantage. This suggests that the
massive expansion of the human brain was the outcome of meme replication and
is an example of meme–gene co-evolution.
There are more memes than there are host brain processing power and retention
capacity so that memetic selection must be taking place. The reason why some
memes succeed and others fail is a consequence of the properties of our sensory
systems and mechanisms of attention. That is, the most significant single element
determining which memes proliferate lies in the parameters set by our evolved
psychological mechanisms. This explains why some ideas, practices and emotional
states, and not others, are passed from generation to generation and neighbour to
neighbour. The more ways there are to spread memes, and the faster they can go,
the less constrained they will be by genes. The development of mass
communications on a global scale, from the printing press through television and
on to the Internet, has been a major contemporary mechanism for this process.
Links Culture, determinism, discourse, evolutionary psychology, language

Men’s movement Since the 1970s there has been an identifiable ‘men’s movement’,
albeit one that operates on a fairly limited scale. The initial perspective of this
movement was as a sympathetic counterpart to feminism, indeed, one aspect of the
movement was a self-effacing wish to make amends to women. Another trend was
fuelled by the psychotherapeutic idea of ‘working-on-oneself’ to become a better
person. However, by the 1990s a trend had emerged in the movement that was less
sympathetic to feminism so that men were urged to ‘get in touch’ with a lost
masculinity that was more vital than the ‘softer’ feminized man of the
contemporary world.