Meme Classification

Its been awhile since I last posted. During this time, I have to develop answers to two limitations Tony asked me to address after my classification project. He want to make sure that the taxonomy was organized correctly and could be computed. I thought I did pretty good for the first ever attempt to classify memes that I am aware of. But I set about meeting Tony's conditions. I found one major error in the taxonomy but am still finding computability hard to address.

 Below is are images of the taxonomy.

The first thing I ended up doing was dividing the taxonomy into three parts. The first stage relates to memes place in the general grouping of knowledge. Here memes come from the object part of knowledge. Majority of objects are physical items. Memes though are the physical representation of an idea that can propagates. They come in two forms genetic and viral memes.. Genetic memes are large grouping of memes, often known as memeplexes, and exist through many generations. Viral memes are usually independent and short lived. It is this viral meme that SMiSC and this blog is interested in.

The second stage of the meme taxonomy is designed to classify the way the meme is packaged. The first chain separates memes into hardcopy an Internet. Again this blog is only interested in the Internet packaging of memes. This leaves us with a wide range of how memes can be packaged. To simplify things we are going to convert every meme we study into text packages. But everything about the next chains and their facets apply to all forms of packages

The message is the final stage of the taxonomy. It is at this point that Tony's question about my organization comes into play. He wanted me to make sure that facets were in the correct position on the chains. This is done by simply making sure that they could not be moved around. Second they had to actually be attributes of the memes not characteristics of a meme. With these in mind I re-conceptualizd my taxonomy at this stage.

First I found I had the right order for messages and style. Messages are how you communicate an idea. They are broken down into the four general types. monologue, phatic, emotive, and vocative. Each of these are made up of one or more styles. Styles then fall below the message on the chain. Its facets are signs, signals and symbols. Now came, what I think was important mistake, I placed targets as a chain below the style in the classification. I assumed targets defined the styles that went into the message. This time I removed targets from the classification because I feel they are characteristics of a meme since they lie outside the meme package. Are they important? Yes very much so.

The other question Tony asked me about computability is one that is harder to address. Going from the top to the bottom of the taxonomy its pretty easy not to worry about computability, as you are just describing memes. But SMiSC doesn’t want to describe memes it wants to identify and create them. This requires moving up the chain and computability. It is at the very chain that we encounter problems of computability. Its going to require a lot more work to address

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