Blogging And Other Memes

The idea of blogging, once conceived, was quickly spread and adopted so that we can safely name it today a cultural phenomenon. You may even say it was an idea that was good in self-replicating. The analogy with the biological self-replicators, the genes, was not lost to Richard Dawkins who first coined the term "meme" in his innovating "Selfish Gene" debut. The concept of cultural or otherwise units of information that can replicate in human minds and be subject to their own natural selection was an attractive one and a lot of people worked on it. Some of them produced comprehensive studies like Susan Blackmore in "The Meme Machine" (on my to-read list) and the terms "meme" and "memetics" (as in genetics) officially entered the dictionary. I was reminded of the topic when I came across a few blogs that used the term and I realized it was a lot more popular than I thought. Unfortunately, memetics does not fare as well in its respective field. The inherent difficulties that come with the vagueness of meme's definition and the vast complexity of human culture make memetics' future as a science doubtful. Indeed, it is hard to conceive of a science that will be able to make predictions or provide some kind of solutions about culture. This does not mean that it is impossible, though. Memetics deals with a subject that is connected with areas we know very little about, such as the origin of language or the nature of consciousness. As it is naturally abandoned these days, I still believe it will be revived in a future in which our knowledge will allow it.
If you are interested for more information, you can take a look at this thorough Wikipedia article.