Memes as Effective Communication

The study of rhetoric, in its most basic sense, is the study of effective communication. This may be orally or in writing, but the focus is on how a person should structure their message so that it is conveyed in the best way possible. The ancient Greeks argued about this on whether the audience, the speaker, or the message should be focused on, and even today, there are many competing theories about effective communication.

Memes were introduced in a popular science book. The have been used by philosophers, biologists, and even some psychologists. They have not, however, been successfully used in the field of rhetoric. Many of the ideas that are used in rhetoric can be argued as being similar to memes, but the actually theory has not yet been used.

Memetic theory can explain why certain ideas have survived over time along with why certain ideas or actions become popular in modern day culture. If a certain dance move becomes popular, it is because of straightforward imitation. People see someone doing something, and they copy it. Memetic theory would say that the meme for that dance infected the mind of another person. This is hows memes work. They apply to both actions and language, as well as any other idea that can be replicated in a non-genetic fashion.

Basic ideas about how an effective speech should be given involve understanding one’s audience, presenting the material in a clear and understandable fashion, and choosing words that are appropriate, among other things. Memes can apply to every one of these categories. By looking at one’s audience, it can be analyzed which memes will more effectively infect them.  By presenting information clearly, it can be seen how a meme will travel from one mind to another more easily. Finally, by choosing appropriate wording, certain words may be memes in themselves that the audience will catch on to and then pass on to other people after the speech.

By looking at each of these in a memetic sense, a deeper understanding can be had about why something is effective. Just as we discuss communication as being effective or ineffective, we can discuss memes as being effective or not. The two fields are absolutely intertwined.

I shall note here that it is interesting to be attempting to communicate the idea of memes. The concept of memes is a meme. I hope I am practicing what I preach and conveying the message so that it will spread more effectively and to more minds.

If Memes are the Answer, Then What is the Question?

I will admit that this title was taken from an essay in the compilation book Darwinizing Culture, which is a discussion on memetic theory. The question, however, is very relevant to this topic as this is another area memes are being applied to, at least by myself.

Memes have been used to explain the spread of ideas, using the analogy of gene selection (Dawkins). They have been used to explain consciousness (Dennett). But I want to apply them to rhetoric, which has not been done as much.  So if the answer is memes, it seems that there are many different questions it can be the answer to, and this is just another one of them.

Rhetoric seems so obviously tied to memes that it is surprising the two have not been brought together before. Rhetoric is about language and how to use it to effectively communicate a message, but there are also the underlying ideas that the language is transferring from one brain to another. Both of these aspects, language (the carrier) and ideas (the message), are memes. We often think of the ideas as being memes when exemplifying the theory, but actual language, and I mean this in a linguistic sense, is also a meme.

I quoted this passage from Dawkins in a separate post on this web site, but I would like to reiterate it here:

Geoffrey Chaucer could not hold a conversation with a modern Englishman, even though they are linked to each other by an unbroken chain of some twenty generations of Englishmen, each of whom could speak to his immediate neighbours in the chain as a son speaks to his father. Language seems to ‘evolve’ by non-genetic means, and at a rate which is orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution.

What Dawkins is getting at is that the language we see today can be understood and originated using memetic means. As an example, I have an aunt who grew up in the Chicago area. When she got married, she moved to Louisville, Kentucky with her husband. As my father informed me, she returned only a few months later with a slight twang in her speech, which only became more prevalent the longer she lived there. She was infected with the meme of a Kentucky accent. She didn’t consciously do this, she simply picked up a trait that those around her had. She was part of a new meme pool.

It is quite obvious that language changes over time. Dawkins pointed this out, and we can even see this in the past few years with the development of “text speak”. Blackmore makes a great point that humans are the first species to let loose the second replicator. Once we evolved the ability to be infected, the memes we ourselves created spread throughout the species. Language no doubt took a long time to develop, but it had to do so through imitation of those in close proximity. Moving forward, there are thousands of languages and even more dialects of each present in humans, and these are ever changing. Globalization and other modern factors play a role in how the future of this will look.

So if memes are the answer, two possible questions it answers is both rhetoric as effective communication and language as a carrier of ideas. Memes are at play on two levels, both equally as powerful.

The Stuff of Memes and Rhetoric

A very common criticism of memes is that it is tough to know what they are in an ontological sense. In this manner, they are not perfectly analagous to genes. Randy Groves, a humanities professor at Ferris State University, posed this question to me. He asked what memes are ontologically, but also what is their substrate. We know what the substrate of genes are. The substrate is us. We carry the genes and pass them on to our offspring. The question gets a bit tougher with memes. Blackmore believes that memes take host in brains, but her concept of temes, which is really just a more specific type of meme, shows that memes may also live in the technological world. So where is the substrate, and if there is none, how do they exist?

The following quote answers this question very tidily:

This is what makes it so amazing. You don’t need a designer or a plan or foresight or anything else. If there is something that is copied with variation and it’s selected, then you must get design appearing out of nowhere. You can’t stop it!

This is taken from Blackmore’s TED talk on memes. She is referring to both evolution in the genetic and memetic sense. This idea is that there needs to be three things. Something to be copied, variation to exist, and selection to choose the more suitable aspect of that variation. This is why we see evolution working so well over time. This is also why memes have been so effective on our minds. A substrate does not need to exist! The fact that there is variation in memes and they are selected and copied from one brain to another is all that needs to occur for there existence to be possible.

Back to the fact that they are not perfectly analogous to genes, another way is that they do not have actual substance. They are, much of the time, ideas. Speaking strictly philosophically, a person cannot go and pick up an idea and then throw it away. It does not work like that. We can do this with genes. The human genome has been mapped and genetic bredding is possible because we know where certain traits exist. As Dennett says, when a song pops into our minds without us thinking of it or hearing it, that is a meme showing its face. The idea with memetics is that it applies the idea of genetic selection to ideas and actions.

The concept of a non-material selection should be very much in-step with rhetoricians. The thing they study, effective communication, is not something we can feel or touch, it is an idea that is subjective and needs to be adapted if effective rhetoric is to be used. Politicians make their case to the public and certain ideas catch on. Rheotric would suggest that they communicated effectively. Memetics would suggest that the memes used were in fact effective and stuck with the brains of the people watching. This is what I mean when I say the two are intertwined. Maybe the reason that rhetoricians have not latched onto memetic theory is that it is so close that it gets looked over. That is simply speculation, though.