Meme's in the Modern World

In this week’s reading, Brin’s “Dogma of Otherness”, four different types of memes were discussed. Memes are basically ideas that can be spread by people and only exist in human minds. The four types of worldview memes discussed in this article were Paranoia, Machismo, The East, and the Dogma of otherness. The main idea behind Paranoia is that individuals’ rights should be given up for the security of the country. In this worldview it is also crucial that authority is all-powerful and that other worldviews are kept out of that country in order to avoid change and stay secure. Machismo was the next meme discussed and this is the idea is mainly that men should be dominant and take revenge on whoever wrongs them. In this worldview women have very little rights, individuals are considered important, and revenge is necessary. The third meme was called The East. This worldview considers the needs of the whole country as being greater than those of the individual. Individualism is looked down upon and any deviation from what is expected of a person is punished. The final meme discussed was the Dogma of Otherness. This meme completely accepts individualisms and rewards innovation and change. It is also important that authority is questioned in countries with this worldview.

This entire outtake on worldviews and memes was completely foreign and new to me. I thought this view was interesting but it also had various holes in it, which seemed to be blatantly obvious. The first being that Brin attempts to categorize countries by these different memes and I feel like that cannot be done. Most countries have different amounts of the population with different ideals and beliefs and this intern causes them to each follow different worldviews. For example some people in the U.S. who never leave their hometown may be completely opposed to foreign ideas and this could fall under the Paranoia category. There also are people who live in cities and may accept new ideas and beliefs with open arms, these people would fall under the category of Dogma of Otherness. This shows that in one country alone many, if not all of these memes may be present and countries cannot be characterized by one meme alone. Another thing lacking are more types of worldview memes, this very basic idea is a good start to categorizing and explaining worldviews, but there are countries that are completely controlled by religious beliefs, or controlled by the media and these memes do not explicitly fit into one of the worldviews mentioned above. Overall this article was fairly interesting, and could be extended into a much larger research topic.

Jeremy Hare