A Companion to Public Philosophy

31Philosophy Through Memes

SIMON J. EVNINE

1 Philosophy. Through. Memes.

My title has three words, and I begin with some reflections on each. In this way, we can approach the question of whether something can be of philosophical interest while at the same time being a bit of throwaway internet humor.

A paradigm of a meme, in its contemporary sense (which may or may not be well described by the theory of cultural transmission in connection with which Richard Dawkins (1976) introduced the term¹), is an image macro – an image copied by users, who customize it by adding their own text according to implicitly prescribed norms. Archaic Rap, for example, uses a striking self‐portrait by Joseph Ducreux to which users are supposed to add archaic‐sounding versions of rap lyrics, in two chunks, at the top and bottom of the image, in Impact font. (This positioning and styling of the added text is common to many image macros. See Figure 31.1.)

The term “meme” is applied either to the common template (the image and the requirements on the formal and material features of the user’s contribution) or to the singular results of deploying the template.²

Types of memes that are not image macros include (some) Twitter hashtags and (some) behaviors. #ScaleBackABook is a Twitter hashtag coined by the novelist Celeste Ng. People use the hashtag and post “scaled back” versions of a book title, e.g. Neck and Neck with Good and Evil or All’s Well That Ends.³ The template consists of the hashtag and the ...