This brings up the Sapir Worf hypothesis, or the newspeak for it, “Linguistic Relativity”. After all, memes must be expressible, musn’t they? If they are then if it were true, then the memes that you have bound the memes that you can espouse—linguistic relativity in a nutshell.
Many memes these days come in picture form, but for that you need a medium capable of showing pictures, and the culture that places value in making such media universally available. Without that culture, and without the apparatus to share picture-memes those memes would quickly die out, though some abstract notion of some of them, perhaps carried along the linguistic pathway in the same way that even though we don’t use floppy disks for anything everyone uses them to ‘save’. So in a sense not only is it the media and its memes that has to be prior to memes expressed via it, but also the language memes have to be there in order for them to be used. Language might as well just be thought as the structure and set of of meme universals.
Looks like there’s been activity on Wikipedia since I’ve dug up this issue last suggesting that at least since the 1980′s there’s been recent research on how language, and memes influence thought/future use of memes/language. Reddit in particular has some really good data on this that they last I heard were not sharing with the world.
The big question is if memes are different, which evidence suggests, why is this so?
This brings up the Sapir Worf hypothesis, or the newspeak for it, “Linguistic Relativity”. After all, memes must be expressible, musn’t they? If they are then if it were true, then the memes that you have bound the memes that you can espouse—linguistic relativity in a nutshell.
Many memes these days come in picture form, but for that you need a medium capable of showing pictures, and the culture that places value in making such media universally available. Without that culture, and without the apparatus to share picture-memes those memes would quickly die out, though some abstract notion of some of them, perhaps carried along the linguistic pathway in the same way that even though we don’t use floppy disks for anything everyone uses them to ‘save’. So in a sense not only is it the media and its memes that has to be prior to memes expressed via it, but also the language memes have to be there in order for them to be used. Language might as well just be thought as the structure and set of of meme universals.
Looks like there’s been activity on Wikipedia since I’ve dug up this issue last suggesting that at least since the 1980′s there’s been recent research on how language, and memes influence thought/future use of memes/language. Reddit in particular has some really good data on this that they last I heard were not sharing with the world.
The big question is if memes are different, which evidence suggests, why is this so?