Memes versus signs: On the use of meaning concepts about nature and culture
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Erkki Kilpinen
Abstract
In recent years, the so-called ‘meme’ concept, originally introduced by Richard Dawkins and modelled analogously after the phenomenon of gene, has aroused much discussion. There have also been attempts to develop a systematic discipline of ‘memetics’ upon this notion, and suggestions that this opens up unforeseen possibilities for studying human culture in a new way, as compatible with biological evolution. This article argues that these attempts are misguided. The meme is a new word but not a new concept, it is only a new version of the traditional semiotic concept of sign. More pointedly, the meme is not merely an old idea in new clothing, it is in all important respects an inferior alternative to the semiotic sign. The consequence of this is that the suggested memetics would leave open the cleavage between the study of nature and culture that semiotics traditionally has attempted to close.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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Articles in the same Issue
- Looking behind the symbol: Mythic algebra, numbers, and the illusion of linear sequence
- Role conflict as an interactional resource in the multimodal emergence of expert identity
- Symbols in dialogical structure of semiotics
- The interpretation of verbo-pictorial images in billboards and store banners in Jordanian society: An experimental study
- Identity, freedom, and answerability in the global world: A semiotic approach
- Signification and alterity in Emmanuel Lévinas
- Semiosis in cognitive systems
- A view on denotation in photography
- Xenology as phenomenological semiotics
- Fashion as communication: A semiotic analysis of fashion on ‘Sex and the City’
- Memes versus signs: On the use of meaning concepts about nature and culture
- Media literacy and semiotics: Toward a future taxonomy of meaning
- Multiscale textual semiotic analysis
- Deconstructing Grimm's laws reveals the unrecognized foot and leg symbolism in Indo-European lexicons
- A semiotic approach to the pathology of literary Décadence
- Complex systems in Renaissance and Postmodern texts: Aesthetic and epistemological consequences
- ‘To give an imagination to the listeners’: The neglected poetics of Navajo ideophony
- Hjelmslev's semiotic model of language: An exegesis
- Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the land of the Cartesians: From comparative reception to cultural comparison
- Quelques parcours artistiques contemporains comme illustration du mouvement de la semiosis : Compte rendu d'Interpréter l'art contemporain de Nicole Everaert-Desmedt
