Re: virus: Definition of meme (from alt.memetics)

Alex Williams (thantos@decatl.alf.dec.com)
Mon, 30 Dec 1996 09:13:23 -0500 (EST)

> This is certainly the definition of an *active* meme. My proposal would
> be to also permit inactive, archived, or in-transmission units of
> information to be referred to as memes, as well as memes in the abstract.
> This tends to be consistent with the way we actually use words of this
> class, such as gene.

Now, David, we're not going to go head first back into the Zanderian
Heresy debate again, are we?

There is not total commitment to the idea that there /can/ be `memes
in transit' or `memes offline-stored.' See `conduit theory' in the ML
archives.

(To sum for those that missed it the first time, myself and a handful
of acolytes believe that memes can /only/ exist within the mind,
cannot be translated or encoded in any way; what you transmit and
encode are the /products/ of memes, behaviours and patterns of change
in the environment.)