Thursday 26 November 2009

Memetics on Wikipedia

Currently http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics is the top hit for "Memetics" in prominent search engines.

The page makes for pretty strange reading. Aaron Lynch gets more mentions than Daniel Dennett. The section on "criticisms" consists of two brief paragraphs.

There's a whole section on whether the definition of meme refers to brain structures or artefacts/behaviors that doesn't seem to mention the possibility that memes might consist of information.

The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Memetics is also rather strange. It's a good place to see how confused many people are about the topic.

Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine goes viral

Pirate copies of Susan Blackmore's "The Meme Machine" currently appear to be floating around on the internet.

I presume this is in flagrant violation of international copyright law - since the document seems to move about a bit from time to time.

Virus of the Mind, The Selfish Meme and Darwin's Dangerous Idea seem to have made it there too.