"Internet Meme"/"Memetics" confusion

Yes, Youtube comments are typically stupid, but they have wound up making a specific intellectual problem clear.

In specific, the internet and 4Chan in particular have made the definition of "meme" significantly more specific and significantly less useful to the population at large. The word meme actually originates from "memetics", a highly useful intellectual field that posits that ideas evolve like life (they mutate in people's heads and spread by getting people to express them to other people). Unfortunately, the field, which actually is interesting enough to gain some public traction, seems to have had its public reputation killed by its newfound association with internet in-jokes (which many people either find annoying or, more rarely, worship as their own culture).

What do you think can be done about this?

edited 13th Apr '11 4:43:53 PM by PDown

I don't see anything really being done about it, it'll be like "theory", it'll have a public definition and scholarly definition.

Try spawning an interesting, thought-provoking, life-changing meme of course!

With cats.

There will be two definitions one of which is more widely used and the other which is typically only used in scholarly situations. Shit happens.

Actually, I preferred it when it was called Semiotics.

Aren't Semiotics and Memetics different enough though? Or did I miss the announcement?

They're very different in their approaches, since one is related to linguistics and structuralism, while the other attempts to use the scientific method.

Semiotics exists because of an eccentric logician and a linguistics teacher who didn't know how linguistics were taught. Memetics exists so sociobiologists don't feel uncomfortable when they have to talk about things that can't be traced back to genes.