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lettuceLeafer OP wrote

Reply to comment by roanoke9 in Memes Are Actually Better Theory than Most Anarchist Classics by lettuceLeafer

Wait how are memes the building block? Most of them require text.

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asterism wrote

probably refering to meme in the academic sense i.e. in the original meaning of the term meme.

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roanoke9 wrote (edited )

Most, not all. The most basic definition of meme from linguistics is simply a symbolic representation of an idea. Hieroglyphics and ideograms are memes. A cave painting might have been a meme, there isn'tenough info to be sure. I may have conflated the modern colloquial usage wuth the linguistic one, but they are not functionally different. If one had a visual format that included tfw for example, once the format was familiar, the tfw could be omitted, and then show a cartoon of a guy rocking back in a chair, with a startled look. This would then translate to that feeling when you rock back in a chair and almost fall but then you don't fall, with no words used. My meme culture knowledge is limited and my linguistics pretty rusty so maybe I' m off base. The spirit of my critique holds though, in that there's no reason to disrespect memes per se unless one's goal is to prevent the transfer of ideas since memes are pretty demonstrably good at doing that.

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roanoke9 wrote

Tldr: what we call memes is a subset of the entity linguists call memes and both boil down to a symbolic method of information transfer. Does a painting with some text on it cease to be a painting because it has some text?

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