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Tag: the digital

Did Memes Create the Digital to help us Remember?

If there is such a thing as “memes,” did they drive humans toward the digital? A meme has been defined as a theoretical unit of cultural information. Digital replication is exact, whereas human memory is fallible. Some say human memory doesn’t even remember things, but rather the relationship between things. If a meme wanted to persist in an exactly identical form as it passed from human to human, it could only do so through the digital. In some ways this is counter to the idea of evolution, it’s not an adaptive system. The digital meme can’t adapt because it would become unreadable. This meme, and no other, shall survive.

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