DISCOURSAL MEMETICS
Discoursal Memetics: The Power of an Idea
ABSTRACT
Communities that define themselves as discourse communities according to the requirements set
out by John Swales weave themselves intricately into the lives of many people. These
communities are the building blocks with which people define themselves as individuals whether
it be a religious affiliation, a sports team, or even just a hobby that has a strong following. When
looking at these communities through the lens of memetic studies that Richard Dawkins
originally discussed in his book The Selfish Gene (1976) you can begin to see what makes
certain communities of discourse more popular and longer lived than other communities.
Furthermore taking a memetical approach to studying discourse communities can be valuable in
studying how these groups evolve and change over the years along with the ever-changing
cultures.
Introduction
Malcolm Gladwell once said in reference to his book The Tipping Point (2000), “The tipping
point is that magic moment when an idea trend or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and
spreads like wildfire.” Ideas can spread from person to person and cause large social movements
and bring people together in some very interesting ways. Communities that share discourse are
important to study when talking about spreading ideas as they share many commonalities and
bring people together that have the same goals in mind. The anonymous social media site
“Reddit.com” is a prime example of discourse communities and how strangers can become
connected by some of the aspects that James Paul Gee and John Swales have claimed to define
discourse communities. Once people connect to these communities they become part of their
personal identities as members of the multiple communities they’ve chosen. Such examples of
this are people who are fans of certain football teams, people of religious faiths, and the members
of a support group.
The definition of a discourse community as defined by Swales relies on six different
characteristics. The community must have a broadly agreed upon set of common public goals
that the members are striving for. The community must have mechanisms of intercommunication
amongst its members. It must use its participatory mechanisms and communication primarily to
provide information and feedback to the members usually in a positive way. They must also
utilize some genres or a medium such as a text through which the goals or beliefs can be
communicated from member to member. With these genres the community must also have their
own lexis or language that is commonly shared and understood among the members. Finally the
community must have varying levels of membership that do not outweigh one another meaning
that the community accepts beginners but has enough experts to introduce and teach them
(Swales p. 4).
While it may be obvious that some communities are discourse communities and certain people
are members and certain people are non-members, what isn’t always so clear is why certain
people join one community over another. I think it is helpful to look at some of Richard Dawkins
DISCOURSAL MEMETICS
work to help explain this, specifically at a portion of his book The Selfish Gene (1976) where he
coins the term memetics. Dawkins explained it as such, “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” (p. 192). The concept of memetics and the meme was originally designed as an
analogy for genetics and the spread of viruses but I will not be focusing on the biological aspects
of his argument. I believe that you can extrapolate broader ideas from this theory and apply them
to discourse communities that thrive off of certain ideas, behaviors, or styles. By doing this I
think it will reveal why people join discourse communities online and offline and what makes
certain communities more successful and gain more members than others.
Looking at the concept of memetics I believe is a reasonable way to study what brings people to
certain communities and helps better understand people’s actions. Everyone is a part of some
type of discourse community whether it’s church, your school of study in university, or even just
sports that people devote their lives to. We build ourselves up by these communities, goals, and
interests we have and are a part of but what leads us to choose to connect with one community
over another? Memetics is the answer to that question as it studies the underlying reasons as to
why people gravitate towards certain social movements and how we make connections and
meaning throughout our lives.
Discoursal Memetics
Ideas spread among people like viruses spread among cells transferring themselves from brain to
brain and mutating in the process. Richard Dawkins said in his essay Viruses of the Mind,
“Human minds, especially perhaps juvenile ones, have the qualities that we have singled out as
desirable for an informational parasite” (1991). The main focus of this paper is to add some more
depth to my research on discourse communities and how they operate. Social media websites,
religious groups, and other forms of discourse communities all have certain goals in mind but I
believe the reason they pursue these goals and form themselves is because of underlying memes
that drive them and the members. These memes may be hidden or not readily seen by the
members which sometime gives the illusion to that member that they may not even be there or
are something they aren’t.
In the Reddit community, and among many other social media websites, the meme has become a
very popular thing. Many people who hear the term will imagine a picture with text laid over it
to deliver a joke or story. But it isn’t just any meme that can be successful on Reddit because
content is filtered by popularity and sometimes even banned entirely due to the lack thereof. The
essential requirement for proposing a new meme on Reddit is that the picture has to connote a
certain idea or sense of being in a social way. This could be exemplified by the Scumbag Stacy
meme that is a picture of a girl who is in her underwear, a shirt, and a flat rimmed hat. The
original picture was posted to a hottest college girl’s forum online by the girl in the picture
herself, Amber Stratton. The SubReddit r/AdviceAnimals picked up the photos and posted them
with captions of scumbag things that girls can do primarily in relationships.
Richard Dawkins after coining the term memetics claimed that the spreading of memes among
communities is not related to their truth but rather just their success. In the case of the Scumbag
Stacy meme I believe it was successful not because people believed that this girl was running
DISCOURSAL MEMETICS
around committing all these adulterous acts but rather that people have had these experiences
before and they can relate to these concepts. When these people can relate and see that other
people are having similar troublesome experiences it makes them comfortable and helps them
connect to the community. Dawkins in his essay Viruses of The Mind uses many examples that
are comparable to what I have just given, many of which have to do with religious groups and
the power that their ideas have over their members. He gives the example of Mullahs committing
suicide to reach heaven in the most sacred and fast way possible and also Jonestown. Jonestown
was a religious settlement founded by Jim Jones who with the power of his ideas and influence
persuaded over 900 people to commit suicide by consuming cyanide.
Dawkins compares the power of an idea to infect a mind and change behavior to that of a virus
that has the power to infect and take control of its host. He goes on in his essay to discuss seven
signs that one may be under the influence of memes by analogously comparing it to a mind virus.
Dawkins talks about how people go to religion because they have a fear of death and the
prospects of being able to survive your own death and enjoy an afterlife make people want to
follow these religions and change major aspects of their lives. I believe the process of people
coming to certain religions is a little different but it does rely on memes to create these discourse
communities. While overcoming death is a central idea of many religious beliefs such as
Christianity, Taoism, and even ancient Egyptian religions it isn’t the main focus of their beliefs
and practices.
What drives these groups is a result of meme complexes, originally a term coined by Dawkins,
that are groupings of memes coming together to create communities of discourse and practice.
Meme complexes are groupings of memes that come together in a host to help better achieve
success with spreading the memes. These sets of ideas can be seen in religions such as
Christianity when you look at Transubstantiation, the water into wine event that aims to show
divine power, and the idea of a resurrection that cleans the sin slates of Christians. You can also
look at all events in the scripture as being separate ideas or memes as they show different
messages and guidelines on how Christians are supposed to live their lives. An example is the
Binding of Isaac where God asked Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac atop of a mountain.
Once Isaac is set atop the stone the angel of God speaks to Abraham and says “Now I know you
fear God” and then provides Abraham with a goat to sacrifice instead. This passage was meant to
show that God is to be put above all even your own flesh and blood, but it delivers the message
with the optimism that God is merciful and kind hearted because he doesn’t make Abraham go
through with the act. The fact that this God is so willing to forgive and be merciful may be one
of the driving memes in this complex that makes Christianity so popular in comparison with
other religions worldwide.
These are examples of how a religion can be made up of many different memes to make a meme
complex but barely scratches the surface of examples available. I would like to make it a point
that meme complexes and memes are the stepping stones that lead to communities of discourse.
Dawkins makes it very clear in his argument that the most susceptible mind that there is to a
mind virus is that of the youth. This can be best exemplified in religious communities where the
faith of the father and mother is passed down to the children in the family and the kids grow up
in these churches, mosques, and other holy places. In most families around the world religion is
passed down from parents to children and has been since the humans have gained intellect to do
DISCOURSAL MEMETICS
so. So what memes lead certain people to become a part of religious communities is an
interesting question but what causes many people to not leave these religions and pursue one of
the other many faiths available is also interesting.
According to a study done by the Pew Research Organization over one half of people raised in
certain religions grow up to follow that same religion. One possible reason for this could be that
once you are raised into and are a part of a certain community it can be hard to get an objective
view on that community and compare other options. These reasons in religious communities
could be the support of other members, the assurance of an afterlife, and the relief of burden
from your day to day sins because you are forgiven. These are things that people build their
entire lives and belief about existence on and once that structure has been questioned and they
see different possibilities as being valid their lives can become unstable.
Only one in five Americans are Atheistic (Faith in Flux) that is interesting because half of the
people in the online survey results changed their faith. There can be a wide range of reasons why
people leave a religion from not believing in the teachings to being unhappy with the way the
leaders worship. The interesting thing though is that the majority of people who are raised into a
religious affiliation either stay with that affiliation or they join another group which meets their
needs. This shows that once people leave a religion or belief system they would rather become a
part of a new system than to not believe in anything at all. Meaning that belief over non-belief is
something that is overall beneficial to the individual.
This sense of connection and structure is a meme that is reoccurring and very prevalent when
looking at communities that share discourse. As humans we are very social creatures even in the
west where we usually have a mindset that we are each individuals and have our own dreams and
aspirations that are unaffected by others. Often times what happens with people is they are raised
in certain discourse communities and the abandonment of these communities and joining of
others can cause you to be exiled from certain groups of people. You can see this in metaphors
like “she broke my heart” which symbolically usually means she ended the relationship but this
shows how a social interaction can cause real almost physical pain like a broken heart. While
intended as a metaphor it shows how people’s social interactions with one another are often
times the most important things in life. In looking at memetics and discourse communities I
can’t overlook the most popular social community online of my generation which is Facebook.
Discourse, Memetics, and Social Media
In the likes of Facebook and Twitter there are some claims that can be made towards the creation
of discourse communities. With Facebook these communities consist of a group of friends that
we have and interact with on their pages and posts. This group of friends usually share common
interests and goals (which is why they’re friends) and share their own dialect or slang of the
language they speak. This lexis usually changes from social group to social group and can be
observed quite easily on the popular social media site. The conversation mechanisms on
Facebook lend themselves to feedback because one person posts something then friends
comment and discuss the matters in the comment section. It also has different levels of members
ranging from the average user who has a certain number of friends to the celebrities that have
millions of friends. There are also “pages” instead of profiles that you “like” and follow getting
DISCOURSAL MEMETICS
updates from them that sets them apart from the normal Facebook profile. Many celebrities,
bands, and events have these pages and it shows different levels of being engaged in the site.
What sets Facebook apart from other sites like Reddit in classifying itself as a discourse
community is that when you join Facebook you already normally have a group of people in mind
that you are going to interact with. These people end up being on your friends list and what they
post and the content you see is now guided specifically towards the group you have created by
friending and liking. In this way Facebook and other social media sites are less of a discourse
community and more of a medium for the discourse communities that you are already a part of
and have interest in to express their memes and gain members and notoriety. For example if you
have friends from your Christian church on Facebook your experience would be drastically
different than perhaps what an atheists or a Muslim person’s newsfeed would be. The case is the
same for other popular social media sites such as Twitter, Myspace, and Instagram that is owned
by Facebook.
Why people make the decisions they do is a complex question with answers varying from one
individual to another. But in looking at communities of discourse and the driving memes behind
them you can see why some people join certain communities. People are usually a part of
multiple different communities of discourse at once whether it is sports teams, a fan club, or any
number of things they have an interest in. Studying these discourse communities can reveal a lot
about how people interact in different social situations and memetics can help understand why.
The main memes that seem to drive people to connect to a certain community over another come
down to connection, relation, discussion with and support from a community of peers.
Sometimes these memes may seem clouded and unrecognizable due to the turbulence or social
strata at the time but by taking an objective memetical approach to judging a situation you can
unravel the guiding forces behind people’s intentions. The understanding of the power an idea
has to play on the peoples intentions is most interesting when considered that everything starts
out with an idea.
DISCOURSAL MEMETICS
REFERENCES
Bjarneskans, Henrik, Grønnevik, Bjarne and Anders Sandberg. (n.d.) The Lifecycle of Memes.
Retrieved from http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Cultural/Memetics/memecycle.html.
Dawkins, Richard. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dawkins, Richard. (1991) Viruses of the Mind. Retrieved from
http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Dawkins/viruses-of-the-mind.html
"Faith in Flux.” (2009). Pew Research Centers Religion Public Life Project RSS. Retrieved from
http://www.pewforum.org/2009/04/27/faith-in-flux
Swales, John. (1987). Approaching the Concept of Discourse Community. Retrieved from
http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED286184.pdf
DISCOURSAL MEMETICS
Biographical Note
Allow me to introduce myself. I am Clayton Joseph James an English Major with a
Journalism Minor studying for my third year here at Coastal Carolina University. I first became
interested in the field of discourse studies in an advanced composition and rhetoric course and
have been refining this paper ever since. I feel honored to be taught by the brilliant minds that
make up the English department and am very excited to make my first submission to the Bridges
Journal. I appreciate the opportunity to submit my work and look forward to hearing the response
from this wonderful community.