Later in the 1980s, the use of the term earworm has spread to define “a tune or part of a song that repeats in one’s mind”. Burroughs, who in the novel The Ticket that Exploded (1962) had proposed the idea of language as an alien virus (“language is a virus (from outer space)”), made eventually visible only thanks to the mediation of writing. Furthermore, the viral metaphor had already been used by writer William S. It is no coincidence that Dawkins, a prominent activist of rationalist atheism, would later come to regard any concept somewhat related to religion as “viruses of the mind”.ģ Geneticist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza (1971) had already begun to work on the possible parallel between cultural and natural dynamics, that is, on the “similarities and differences between sociocultural and biological evolution”. The author suggests memes would replicate like viruses: “When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell” ( ivi, p. 207). Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain, via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation”. According to Dawkins (1976, p. 206) “examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. The New Replicators”), has connections with the ancient Greek root for “memory” and alludes to the isotopy of repetition also by assonating with the French même (same). In the intentions of its creator, the neologism meme, first presented in the final chapter of the1976 book The Selfish Gene (entitled “Memes. The most successful model of sociocultural dynamics rooted in the metaphor of contagion is attributable to biologist Richard Dawkins, whose hypothesis has systematically penetrated the collective imaginary, generating a sort of short circuit, the “contagion of the metaphor” (Volli 2017).Ģ Dawkins imagines the cultural homologue of the genes of the biological world: memes, minimal units of transmission of cultural information, capable of leaping from one head to another thanks to a process of replication subject to the laws of natural selection identified by Darwin. Writer Elias Canetti (1960) describes the dynamics of social contagion by resorting to the notion of discharge ( Entladung ), the culmination of the tension towards a common goal, thanks to which the crowd becomes the mass and feels a moment of delusional happiness, since the accomplished deletion of the differences between individuals is superficial and transitory. Anthropologist Gustave Le Bon (1895) uses the concepts of contagion and suggestion to explain the apparently irrational actions of crowds. Psychologist James Mark Baldwin (1894) defines imitation as a fundamental step in the “natural history of consciousness” of the individual, being the result of the principle of adaptation to the environment. Sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1890) uses the notion of contagion to convey how social forms are being generated thanks to the interaction between the modality of invention (which is typical of people of genius) and that of imitation (typical of the masses). Metaphor of contagion (and contagion of the metaphor)ġ Virality is a long-standing notion within Western social sciences, addressed in different ways and under specific lexicalizations by various seminal authors. The author would like to thank Albert Figurt, Cristina Voto, Maria Giulia Dondero and the two anonymous reviewers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |