minor mistakes are made, the mistakes are not repeated because the children can refer back

to the
“ideal” junk.80 Sperber argues that this kind of copying is not truly replication at all, because
“contrary to what Dawkins writes, the instructions are not ‘self-normalising’. It is the process of
attribution of intentions that normalises the implicit instructions that participants infer from what they
observe.”81 What the children are doing in the origami example is supplementing the given
instructions with information they already have.
Kronfelder agrees with Sperber and baldly asserts that “memes are not replicators” because
the transmission of memes differs so greatly and fundamentally from genes. Whereas genes involve
simple template copying, with one string of DNA serving as the template for the text, memes are
more like mental reconstructions, often after repeated encounters. In this, Kronfelder seems to align
with Gabora’s conception of memes as mental representations based on experiences, although less
sweepingly than Gabora. However, unlike Gabora, Kronfelder, citing Sperber, denies that memes are
replicators at all. Argues Kronfelder: “If social transmission always involves the reconstruction of a
meme from observable physical realizations or phenotypic expression of memes, then no particular
memes are transmitted in social transmission. The memes are reconstructed.”82 While these criticisms
by Sperber and Kronfelder still allow for memetic replication, they greatly reduce the prevalence of
such replication, since only information that is directly copied without any inference would qualify
as a meme.
Yet Simon M. Reader, an ethologist, and Kevin N. Laland, an evolutionary biologist, contend
that although Sperber is correct in asserting that most memes are reconstructed rather than directly
copied as are genes, this does not disqualify them from consideration as replicators. The argue that
reconstructed memes can equally follow Darwinian evolutionary principles, that “they too can
replicate and evolve, and to eliminate them on arbitrary grounds at this early stage in the science of
memetics risks eliminating a large number, maybe even the majority, of interesting cases of social
transmission that may benefit from memetic analysis.”83 For Reader and Laland, what matters is not
the specific form in which transmission occurs, but rather the fidelity of that transmission. From this
they conclude, contra Blackmore, that memes do in fact occur in non-human animals.84

Memetics and Semiotics

80
Dawkins, “Foreword,” ix–xii.
81
Sperber, “An Objection to the Memetic Approach to Culture,” 171.
82
Kronfeldner, “Is Cultural Evolution Lamarckian?,” 505.
83
Simon M. Reader and Kevin N. Laland, “Do Animals Have Memes?,” Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of
Information Transmission 3, no. 2 (1998), http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/1999/vol3/reader_sm&laland_kn.html.
84
Reader and Laland.
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 The final discussion and critique of memes I will examine are those from a semiotic
perspective. Semiotics is the study of sign processing, that is, the study of activities, conducts, and
processes that involve signs, their interpretation, and knowledge production. The semioticists Sebeok
and Danesi argue that a meme “is no more than Dawkins’ own term for what we have called a model
in [general semiotics].”85 Sebeok initially appreciated Dawkins’ replicators or ‘survival machines’
idea, and, in reference to Dawkins’ famous statement that the “gene is just a gene’s way of making
another gene,” he concluded that “all ‘survival machines’ — meaning people, animals, plants,
bacteria, and viruses — are only a sign’s way of making another sign.”86 The sociologist and
semiologist Erkki Kilpinen contends that Sebeok found Dawkins’ initial conception of memes to be
a sound idea precisely because it was Sebeok’s idea. According to Kilpinen, “[Sebeok] had been
talking about universal replication — in signs and models — some ten years before Dawkins.”87
Kilpinen concludes that memetics is largely redundant to semiotics. He states that meme
theorists, in their pursuit of a unifying memetic theory, “have discovered only the tip of the semiotic
iceberg. Their studies have addressed a part of semiotics, one that could be called, after Sebeok, …
anthroposemiotics [emphasis in original]. That field of study is only a subdomain of semiotics in its
entirety, and even within that subdomain the meme theorists have treated only one of its dimensions,
the interpretive dimension.”88 He observes that the disciplines of memetics and semiotics have largely
ignored each other, and so concludes that each must explicitly acknowledge the existence of the other.
Although Kilpinen is highly critical of the need for memetics, since, in his view, “memetics has not
so far revealed any secrets unknown to semiotics,” he nevertheless admits that memetics “should have
the benefit of doubt in view of future possibilities. One such avenue of research might be an approach
to culture by means of social practices instead of linguistic conventions, as has been the prevailing
view in cultural semiotics.”89
Although he does not mention the discipline by name, Michael R. Lissack, a business manager
and cybernetician, links memetics to semiotics in his article “The Redefinition of Memes: Ascribing
Meaning to an Empty Cliché.” He argues that memes should be redefined from being replicators to
being indexicals, the latter a term used within semiotics. Lissack, writing in 2004, contends that
memes, when conceived of as replicators, hold little to no explanatory or causal power. However,
says Lissack, if memes are thought of a “indexical tokens” or “catalytic indexicals,” they prove more

85
Sebeok and Danesi, The Forms of Meaning, 163–64.
86
Sebeok 1989 [1979], The Sign and Its Masters, xxix, quoted in Erkki Kilpinen, “Memes versus Signs: On the Use of
Meaning Concepts about Nature and Culture,” Semiotica 2008, no. 171 (2008): 231,
https://doi.org/10.1515/SEMI.2008.075.
87
Kilpinen, 231.
88
Kilpinen, 230.
89
Kilpinen, 230.
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useful. Lissack explains indexicals as “words used to stand for a set of other words; that is, they
function like an index on the stock market. The Dow Jones Industrial average, for example, stands
for a basket of particular stocks and stands for many of us as an indicator of the market as a whole.”90
Kilpinen illustrates the indexical concept with the following example:
Think about a child with a high fever and red spots on her face. This suggests the conclusion
that the child has measles. This conclusion is not absolutely sure, but highly probable. The child’s
physiological condition, colloquially known as measles, is the dynamical object that produces those
indexical signs, i.e., red spots, on her face. As soon as she is healed, the red spots vanish; in fact their
absence is a reliable indicator about her getting well. The red spots are indexes of measles, they are
present in all measles cases, but they do not tell anything closer to an untutored person about those
biochemical processes that produce them.91

Lissack argues that the environment is the replicator, not the memes, and that memes are better
seen as carriers of meaning that can help convey changes in the meaning of a particular indexical.
Lissack illustrates the shift or breakage of indexical meaning with the following example: “when
Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont switched his party affiliation from Republican to Independent (and
thereby altered control of the US Senate)[,] his speech of explanation was a discussion of his
perceived limits to the indexical ‘republican.’”92 The power of a meme is therefore measured not in
its replicating ability – which would, argues Lissack, be the result of environmental factors – but in
its ability to help bridge the meaning between an old context for an indexical and a new one. “The
successful meme is one whose indexical quality can bridge both the old context and the new, such
that the users of the meme token can dialogue about the meanings evoked by that token without
asserting incommensurability. The unsuccessful meme is one whose indexical quality cannot bridge
the gap between contexts and thus cannot make the transition to new context and new situation.”93 In
Lissack’s opinion, then, a meme stands in the transition point of changes in meaning, rather than
simple replication of meaning.
However, Lissack may not correctly understand Dawkins’ original conception of memes. The
communications scholar Bradley E. Wiggins and English scholar G. Bret Bowers argue that memes
as conceived by Dawkins are catalysts for jumps in cultural evolution.94 This would render Lissack’s
argument vain, since he and Dawkins are in agreement. Perhaps the issue is that Dawkins was
intentionally vague and therefore different and competing interpretations are taken of his claims.
Lissack’s definition of memes as indexicals and catalysts might be too limited, and the broader

90
Michael R. Lissack, “The Redefinition of Memes: Ascribing Meaning to an Empty Cliché.,” Journal of Memetics -
Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission 8, no. 1 (2004), http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/2004/vol8/lissack_mr.html.
91
Kilpinen, “Memes versus Signs,” 225.
92
Lissack, “The Redefinition of Memes: Ascribing Meaning to an Empty Cliché.”
93
Lissack.
94
Bradley E Wiggins and G Bret Bowers, “Memes as Genre: A Structurational Analysis of the Memescape,” New
Media & Society 17, no. 11 (December 1, 2015): 1889, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814535194.
22
understanding of memes as sign processes, which Sebeok, Danesi, and Kilpinen advocate, might be
more helpful. Nonetheless, Lissack takes a semiotic approach to memes, even if he does not state this
directly. Also noteworthy is Lissack’s contention that an unsuccessful meme is one that breaks
contextual meaning. As will be seen in later chapters, this argument about the centrality of contextual
meanint seems to be born out with how internet memes operate, even if it does not apply to memes
in general.
As my survey in this section of the thesis is intended to provide an overview of major
discussions pertaining to memetics rather than come to specific conclusions (which is beyond the
scope of my study), I do need to draw any definite conclusions to the debate. However, I believe that
the semiotic view of memes as signs and indexicals is useful for understanding the definition of
internet meme, since, as will be seen in the next chapter, that definition often varies from the more
traditional understanding of meme, since fidelity is often intentionally broken. Indeed, as will be seen
in following chapters, several scholars and students have examined internet memes from a semiotic
standpoint.

Conclusions
This first chapter has surveyed the history of memes and some of the major discussions
regarding them. In it, I have shown that memes are understood to be cultural replicators spread
through imitation, although the exact nature of them is highly debated. The dictionary definition,
which is promulgated by one of the foremost memeticists, Susan Blackmore, is that memes are
elements of culture replicated through non-genetic means, specifically replication. Many scholars are
critical of the meme concept for a variety of reasons – some because they believe that memes are
“Lamarckian,” some because memes, unlike genes, have not been empirically demonstrated as
material objects, and some because they find the concept largely unnecessary. Drawing my own
conclusions as to the validity of the respective arguments and what to do about them is beyond the
scope of this thesis. The purpose of this chapter was to ground my research in the conceptual history
of memes and understand how this pertains to the internet meme and to digital heritage more broadly.
I do not need to pick a specific side in the debate to conclude the following: Internet memes, a sub-
set of digital heritage, must be understood as not merely virtual objects. The virtual object is merely
a tangible expression of intangible cultural interactions through networked electronic mediums. Thus,
understanding memes as replicated cultural elements and behaviors will help inform the heritage
professional such as myself in understanding how to preserve internet memes as heritage. It is not
just the virtual tangible object to be preserved, but the information, the meanings, that produced it
through interactions between individuals. The interactions themselves are heritage.

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