Daniel Dennett - Memes saved from extinction

Dennett wonders whether Richard Dawkins’ concept of a meme has gone extinct. This is from February 2017.

The blurb reads:

Richard Dawkins’ concept of a meme, an item of culture that is differentially replicated and hence evolves by natural selection, has provoked many misguided attacks, and yet survived in heavily transformed guise to become a dreaded buzzword.

Daniel Dennett - The Digital Planet 1998 (repost)

I previously posted videos in an article titled: Daniel Dennett - The Digital Planet 1998. Those videos were taken down - but it seems they are still available elsewhere on YouTube:

I originally introduced this as follows. The blurb reads:

Daniel Dennett describes how Darwin introduced the idea of natural selection by comparing it to the selective breeding of domestic animals; including intentional selection as well as unconscious selection. Dennett also introduces a fourth category, genetic engineering. He then goes on to show how these categories also apply to the evolution of cultures.

From a conference in 1998 called Der Digitale Planet (The Digital Planet), which also included Douglas Adams, Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker.

IIRC, there was also a Q&A section, which had some good stuff in it. AFAIK, all the other videos are still lost, though there is some audio here.

Susan Blackmore interviewed by Bas Heijne

From 2015. The blurb says: Susan Blackmore is interviewed by Dutch journalist and philosopher Bas Heijne. [...] In this video, Heijne and Blackmore talk about her vision of cultural evolution, the symbiosis between humans and digital systems, and artificial intelligence.

The Wired guide to memes

Wired has an article titled "THE WIRED GUIDE TO MEMES" out. It is subtitled "Everything you ever wanted to know about Nyan Cat, Doge, and the art of the Rickroll." The authors are Angela Watercutter and Emma Grey Ellisby. Most of the article is about internet memes. It credits Richard Dawkins, for the origin of the term "meme", but goes on to argue that memes "have evolved into something much different than what Dawkins originally envisioned". It says:

Dawkins coined the term in 1976, in his book The Selfish Gene, long before the modern internet, before memes morphed into what they are now. Back then, Dawkins was talking about passing along culture—song melodies, art styles, whatever. Today, denizens of the internet think of memes as jokes passed across social media in the form of image macros (those pictures of babies or cats or whatever with bold black-and-white words on them), hashtags (the thing you amended to what you just wrote on Twitter), GIFs (usually of a celebrity, reality star, or drag queen reacting to what you just wrote on Twitter), or videos (that Rick Astley video people used to send you).

This "incompatibilism" is bad. Content which people share widely on the internet are memes in Dawkins original sense. It is OK for people to use "meme" as shorthand for "internet meme", since so much social sharing takes place on the internet these days. But the people who say that "Milhouse is not a meme" - those people are just wrong. They lack basic meme literacy. "Milhouse is not an internet meme" would have more truth to it - though a lot of people stream The Simpsons over the internet these days.

The definition of "meme" has long been a controversial topic in memetics, but few have proposed or promoted confining the term to things shared on the internet - with Limor Shifman being the notable exception. We have the term "internet meme" for that.