I’ve never been a big fan of Richard Dawkins’s notion of memes.  Yet, I’ve noticed that people have used this idea quite often on the Internet.  At least, the word meme.  Memes mean a very particular thing.

Because of that, does the adoption of the idea of memes into everyday conversation on the Internet tell us anything about how we (Internet users) think about how ideas are transmitted?

For a background, memes was an idea put forward by Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene.  In the book, Dawkins argue that evolution evolved through a continuous process of competition among genes for the sake of replicating themselves. Well, that’s an oversimplification of Dawkins’s ideas, but you get the picture.  It’s basic evolutionary biology at the genetic level.  Instead of the species Dawkins’ centers the discussion around gene replication as the unit of evolution.  OK, aside from the potential evolution/creationism distraction, nothing too controversial.

Except, in that same book, Dawkins uses the same Darwinian idea to explain cultural ideas.  That is, Dawkins coins a word, meme, to constitue a form of social/cultural Darwinism.  Dawkins basically argues that culture and ideas can be broken down to the basic unit of a meme, which is analogous to a gene in biology.  In the social sciences, we have words such as frames and discourses that serve a similar (though not identical function).

What’s really controversial is that Dawkins argues that these memes behave in a fashion that is analogous to genes.  He even argues that, extrapolating from the gene analogy, memes replicate under certain conditions.

This idea has been met with some considerable criticism, especially from Mary Midgley who argues that Dawkins’s notion of a meme is reductive, essentialist, Hobbesian, and quackery.

I side with Midgley.  Foucault’s notion of biopower and knowledge/power or Entman’s idea of frames, Laclau and Mouffe’s expansion of the idea of discourse, and Gramsci discussion of ideology seems to hold more weight than Dawkins’s notion of meme.

OK– back to my original question:  Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel that the word meme is frequently used on the Internet to explain phenomena– at least in a popular context.

Does this mean that ideas are being thought of in a scientistic and social Darwinian sense?  If ideas spawn action and cultural production in a digital world, what are the ramifications of this view?