Is Beethoven's Fifth Symphony a meme, or only the first four notes?
Whether by coincidence or by memetic transmission, Beethoven is the favourite example for illustrating this problem. Brodie (1996) uses Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Dawkins (1976) uses the Ninth and Dennett (1995) uses both the Fifth and the Seventh. Dennet adds that the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth are a tremendously successful meme, replicating all by themselves in contexts in which Beethoven's works are quite unknown. So are they the meme, or the whole symphony?
If we cannot answer this question we cannot identify the unit of the meme, and some people clearly think this is a problem for memetics. For example, many years ago Jacob Bronowski wondered why we do not have a better understanding of social change and blamed our not being able to pin down the relevant units (Hull 1982).
Notes:
We cannot specify the unit of a meme.
Folksonomies: memetics beethoven
Taxonomies:
/art and entertainment/shows and events/classical concert (0.544766)
/religion and spirituality/atheism and agnosticism (0.423538)
/art and entertainment/music (0.288838)
Keywords:
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Entities:
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Concepts:
Memetics (0.985519): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc | yago
Richard Dawkins (0.786909): website | dbpedia | freebase | opencyc | yago | musicBrainz
Susan Blackmore (0.778627): website | dbpedia | freebase | yago
Meme (0.662070): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Symphony No. 5 (0.657543): dbpedia | freebase | yago
Symphony (0.648922): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Ludwig van Beethoven (0.609318): website | dbpedia | freebase | opencyc | yago | musicBrainz
The Selfish Gene (0.580092): dbpedia | freebase | yago
The Meme Machine (Popular Science)