I wonder if memetics would serve as a good candidate for the category of things that satisfy without explaining or predicting anything, along with phlogiston, emergence, and complexity. The analogy to biology seems interesting and fun, but is it more useful than as just a way to re-formulate our perspective?
I don’t know where you get the idea that memetics doesn’t explain or predict things from.
We know a lot about what factors influence cultural virulence. Marketing and advertising folk make use of that knowledge on a daily basis. They know which jingles are catchy, which catchphrases are likely to be repeated, which images are more likely to be shared—and so on. We know which ideas play well with which other ones well enough to know that we should not target our condom commercials at the catholic demographic.
“Then a miracle occurs...”
;p
I wonder if memetics would serve as a good candidate for the category of things that satisfy without explaining or predicting anything, along with phlogiston, emergence, and complexity. The analogy to biology seems interesting and fun, but is it more useful than as just a way to re-formulate our perspective?
I don’t know where you get the idea that memetics doesn’t explain or predict things from.
We know a lot about what factors influence cultural virulence. Marketing and advertising folk make use of that knowledge on a daily basis. They know which jingles are catchy, which catchphrases are likely to be repeated, which images are more likely to be shared—and so on. We know which ideas play well with which other ones well enough to know that we should not target our condom commercials at the catholic demographic.
Check out Dan Zarella for some of the recent material: http://danzarrella.com/
He views his work as being memetics: http://danzarrella.com/what-is-a-meme.html