Hello, Researchers,
Is anyone studying the costs and benefits of "meme trading" on social media? Is the effect more negative? That is, causing fewer neural connections to be formed because passing on "junk memes" is such a low cognitive-level activity. OR is there some burst of neural development that comes from passing on many slogans and posters?
I wonder if the cognitive developmental of Facebook and other social media "memes" are being studied.
Older adults tend to use "boilerplate" language when they tell stories. Key words will trigger a story told with identical phrases. These older adults are not creating new neural connections, or very few, when they repeat the same phrases. Do memes function this way and what are their effects on much younger people?
If you use anything of the Memes rule the World dataset slide show attached below, I will appreciate a citation. This is MLA format.
McMillan, Gloria. "Effects of Facebook Memes on the Brain." ResearchGate Accessed 28 Jul 2018. https://www.researchgate.net/post/Effects_of_Facebook_Memes_on_the_brain
An objection is that memes are very different from genes. And so they are. They suffer from much greater mutation rates, and they are not locked into a system as rigidly prescribed as DNA replication . Memes are best thought about not by analogy with genes but as new replicators, with their own ways of surviving . Memes can be copied all over the place, from speech to paper to book to computer, and to another person.
Hello Gloria Lee Macmillan,
The exponential growth of social media has made memes a central element in interactive communication. As Dan Sperber rightly observes, they are" cultural replicators" that are symbolic and have specific associations in human mind. Memes spread on social media in shape of a hyperlink, video, image, or phrase which can either be exactly copied or undergo mutations.While exact replications lack creativity, mutations imposed on memes in the form of addition, omission, and parody represent creativity and involve a highly complex cognitive engagement.As such, the application of memes in social media is a convention which can lead to cognitive development of both young and adult users.
Best regards,
R. Biria
Hello Gloria Lee Macmillan,
Research may suggest that memes create new neuronal connections in the brain.
Memes have already become a widespread cultural phenomenon in internet. Due to that, some critics have said that it has lowered the "real" meaning created by Richard Dawkings and that it lowers cognitive activity.
However, researchers from the UNAM (México) showed that memes are continous re-significations/interpretations of signs shared by a community. [Pérez Salazar, Gabriel; Aguilar Edwards, Andrea; Guillermo Archilla, María Ernestina (2014). «El meme en internet. Usos sociales, reinterpretación y significados, a partir de Harlem Shake». Argumentos [online] 27. ISSN 0187-5795.]
This implies that at the moment of even watching a meme, your brain has to associate at leas two signs that it knows, but now the meaning is different, That new meaning is what the brain has to discover, so it is not a passive action.
Of course, creating memes demands a more intense brain activity, so it's better to create than to watch.
I hope my answer can help you a bit.
Best regards,
Carlo Piérola.
Thank you Colleague Reza and Carlo. Sorry you wrote months ago and I am just seeing it.
I believe memes are a fascinating phenomenon as they represent the deconstruction of language (both English and other). It is such that languages go through transformation throughout time, However, with social media it is recorded which gives us this rare opportunity to conduct our research.
Thank you, Colleague Ismail. The deconstruction language is a very good descriptive phrase.
An objection is that memes are very different from genes. And so they are. They suffer from much greater mutation rates, and they are not locked into a system as rigidly prescribed as DNA replication . Memes are best thought about not by analogy with genes but as new replicators, with their own ways of surviving . Memes can be copied all over the place, from speech to paper to book to computer, and to another person.
Dear Colleagues,
Your two recent answers suggest that perhaps the biological gene metaphor may not be the best. So a meme may be construed as more of a slang term because slang has always had a higher rate of change than standard language. Is a meme a kind of communicative shorthand with hip in-crowd following? Is that a more apt metaphor?
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