The Selfish Meme: Dawkins, Peirce, Freud
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Joel West
Abstract
Biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” by which he meant a unit of culture. Dan Dennett continued by defining a meme as a bunch of bits of information. This paper explores the “meme” and how it is semiotic, both in its technical sense and in its popular sense and explores how memes signify both in terms of classical semiotics and also in terms of post-structuralist thought.
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© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Covenantal trust and semioethics: A reflection on interpersonal and intercultural summoning
- The semeiotic self
- Peirce’s diagrammatic reasoning and the cinema: Image, diagram, and narrative in The Shape of Water
- The three approaches to the semiotics of power
- Musical meaning and indexicality in the analysis of ceremonial mbira music
- The intersemiotic affordances of photography and poetry
- Graphic analogies in the imitation of music in literature
- Exploring the politics of visibility: Technology, digital representation, and the mediated workings of power
- Smart objects in daily life: Tackling the rise of new life forms in a semiotic perspective*
- The dagoba and the gopuram: A semiotic contrastive study of the Sinhalese Buddhist and Tamil Hindu cultures
- The Selfish Meme: Dawkins, Peirce, Freud
- Towards a semiotic model of interlingual translation
- Intermedial references and signification: Perception versus conception
- The “material function” in cinema: Resolving the paradox of the glitch
- Extending the embodied semiotic square: A cultural-semantic analysis of “Follow your Arrow”
- Time embodied as space in graphic narratives: A study in applied Peircean semiotics
- The origin of editorial images: Recycling, culture, and cognition
- Imago Dei: Metaphorical conceptualization of pictorial artworks within a participant-based framework
- On the origins of semiosic translation, the role of semiosis in translation and translating and the nature of sign systems: Response to Jia
- Special section: A sociosemiotic exploration of identity and discourse (Le Cheng, Ning Ye and David Machin, guest eds.)
- Introduction: A sociosemiotic exploration of identity and discourse
- The misleading nature of flow charts and diagrams in organizational communication: The case of performance management of preschools in Sweden
- A tentative analysis of legal terminology diachronic changes and the problem of communication effectiveness in legal settings
- Re-exploring Language development and identity construction of Hui nationality in China: a sociosemiotic perspective
- Evidentiality of court judgments in the People’s Republic of China: A semiotic perspective
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Covenantal trust and semioethics: A reflection on interpersonal and intercultural summoning
- The semeiotic self
- Peirce’s diagrammatic reasoning and the cinema: Image, diagram, and narrative in The Shape of Water
- The three approaches to the semiotics of power
- Musical meaning and indexicality in the analysis of ceremonial mbira music
- The intersemiotic affordances of photography and poetry
- Graphic analogies in the imitation of music in literature
- Exploring the politics of visibility: Technology, digital representation, and the mediated workings of power
- Smart objects in daily life: Tackling the rise of new life forms in a semiotic perspective*
- The dagoba and the gopuram: A semiotic contrastive study of the Sinhalese Buddhist and Tamil Hindu cultures
- The Selfish Meme: Dawkins, Peirce, Freud
- Towards a semiotic model of interlingual translation
- Intermedial references and signification: Perception versus conception
- The “material function” in cinema: Resolving the paradox of the glitch
- Extending the embodied semiotic square: A cultural-semantic analysis of “Follow your Arrow”
- Time embodied as space in graphic narratives: A study in applied Peircean semiotics
- The origin of editorial images: Recycling, culture, and cognition
- Imago Dei: Metaphorical conceptualization of pictorial artworks within a participant-based framework
- On the origins of semiosic translation, the role of semiosis in translation and translating and the nature of sign systems: Response to Jia
- Special section: A sociosemiotic exploration of identity and discourse (Le Cheng, Ning Ye and David Machin, guest eds.)
- Introduction: A sociosemiotic exploration of identity and discourse
- The misleading nature of flow charts and diagrams in organizational communication: The case of performance management of preschools in Sweden
- A tentative analysis of legal terminology diachronic changes and the problem of communication effectiveness in legal settings
- Re-exploring Language development and identity construction of Hui nationality in China: a sociosemiotic perspective
- Evidentiality of court judgments in the People’s Republic of China: A semiotic perspective
