blog posting by Arie Altena
“Today the whole day will be about memes and social communication in a broad sense” is how Florian Cramer kicks off the second day of the Viral Communication conference at the Piet Zwart Institute. He dedicated the day to Malcolm McLaren – deceased last week, one of the inventors of viral and guerrilla marketing, one could say. His ‘genius’ being that he was completely open about the fact that how he was publicising the punk movement and the Sex Pistols was a ‘swindle’.

The metaphor of the virus for communication of course derives originally from William S. Burroughs: who in his 1970 short book The Electronic Revolution made his theory of language as a virus explicit – which one can find already in his earlier books like Nova Express.

The idea spread to popular culture through Laurie Anderson’s song, but even more through the reception of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, which introduced the idea of a ‘meme’, as a communication unit which spreads like a virus. A ‘meme’ is anything that can be copied from one mind to another – which is one short definition of meme one can find on the internet.

(I am following Florian Cramer’s examples from his introduction).

Cramer emphasizes that such an idea might be very successful, many know it, but it is not a definition which coheres nicely with contemporary linguistic theory. He raises the point if a meme might not be the same as Peirce’s ‘semiosis’, or rather a special kind of ‘semiosis’ – namely one that concentrates on the propagation of an idea.