About
Memetics — the study of Memes — is a fledgling in the academic world.
If memes are the self-replicating informational units in our midst, competing for mindshare in human culture, then the mind is an operating system upon which all meme activity takes place.
Some websites focus on analysis of the memes themselves. While this is important (and entertaining) work, it’s a bit like doing archaeology without the theory of evolution: lots of fossil-digging and classification (and lulz), but no predictive power.
To generate predictive power, memetics must gain understanding of the constraints and hooks in the cultural operating system which give memes their boundaries, frictions, and purchases in the human mind. That means taking deep, long looks at recent research in productive fields from science, engineering, and humanities to provide us with evidence of the rules by which individuals and cultures create, spread, absorb, and leave behind various ideas and behaviors — the expressions of meme activity.
The vast majority of great thinkers who could contribute greatly to the understanding of this operating system do not call themselves memeticists. That’s why we’ve taken on the project of collecting the relevant threads of neuroscience, cognitive science, aesthetics, philosophy, behavioral economics, psychology, statistics, linguistics, marketing, and computer science and weaving them together into a tapestry that may help us get a better grasp on what we know about the memetic operating system and where the edges are.
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