"On Memes: A Very Short Introduction to Memetica...."

Talk by Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter @ the annual meeting of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts< & Letters. 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEnqC3usT60

Abstract: As is widely known, memes are commonly understood as catchy items on social media – often an image with text – that “goes viral” and gets shared/spread among many people online. However, this talk discusses the older, original, and more expansive sense of “meme”, introduced and elaborated upon by Dawkins, Blackmore, and Dennett, among others, that initially means something like a “unit of cultural information.” One way rhetorically and philosophically these days to conceive of “it all” is as a massive ecology of memes. What I call “memetica” is another way of exploring a rhetoric and conception of a totalizing ecology of information. The term “information” may cover a massive amount of multi- and cross-disciplinary conceptual territory involving “bits” in physics, “genes” in biology, and “signs” in arts/humanities. This talk very briefly introduces the origins, rhetoric, and concept of memes as an initial way in to the topic of information – arguably one of the most powerful, dynamic concepts in contemporary existence.

Videography credit: Gracey Bennett-Carpenter, 2023

​[Correction: The reference in the talk and slides to Bateman should, instead, be Bateson (1979).]

"Developing Relationships & Emotional Closeness"

Transformation & Transcendence Roundtable Podcast

Franklin Sollars, with Farid Alsabeh, Lea Dickinson, Joshua Morrow, and Ben Bennett-Carpenter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKGXn8BsCmA

"An important shift from noun to verb (and back again) takes place with ‘meme.’
 
As Dennett has put it, a meme is 'a way.' 
 
A meme is a differential process within a context.  That’s where ‘value arises’ (cf. Bateman).
 
A noun is a calcification or a snapshot in time of a verb.  The verb is where the action is.  A noun is a useful placeholder in the middle of the overall action whether that action is very fast or very, very slow.
 
A noun is documentation, a record of what has happened, an artifact of past actions:
 
                             e.g., a chair
                                      Ben
                                      happiness
                                      Tuesday"

-Fragments of Memetica, No. 10.  [20200926]

"Problem Solving, Anxiety, Fear, & Growth"

Transformation & Transcendence Roundtable Podcast

Franklin Sollars, with Farid Alsabeh, Lea Dickinson, Joshua Morrow, and Ben Bennett-Carpenter  ​

https://youtu.be/BaKTKlD1OEY

Transformation & Transcendence Roundtable Podcast:  "What is Transformation and Transcendence?"
  
Franklin Sollars, with Farid Alsabeh, Lea Dickinson, and Ben Bennett-Carpenter

https://youtu.be/ovnu_7gonWI​

Out now:  "Emotional Storms" & "Speak of Galaxies" by Ben Bennett-Carpenter

in Franklin Sollars, Food for Thought, Psyche, Spirit, and Soul  (2023), pp. 133-137, 140-141 (Printed in Monlee, Illinois: Independently published by Dr. Franklin Sollars, PhD).

https://www.amazon.com/Food-Thought-Psyche-Spirit-Soul/dp/B0BW31G6G2/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1677801452&sr=8-1

Transformation & Transcendence Roundtable Podcast, Episode 1

Franklin Sollars, with Farid Alsabeh, Lea Dickinson, Joshua Morrow, and Ben Bennett-Carpenter

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-RFQ2voPsI