Can someone help me out with the difference between tropes and memes, perhaps with examples of each? I’ve been having these interesting conversations with my older son about Internet-based, popular culture memes. A lot of what he describes as memes, I would have called tropes. But I don’t really know what I’m talking about and the usual dictionary definitions are not helping me much. In practice, what do “we” mean, inside the academy and out, by these terms?
I think in practice the distinctions are collapsing. But I might take a stab this way:
–tropes are recurrent figures, images, patterns which organize a way of thinking. The repetition of a trope tends to reiterate–or at least carry traces of–its historical meaning and function. They circulate as convention, but also as shorthand tactics for conveying meaning. I remember my 11th-grade Biology class, and the study of tropism in plants — tropes lean toward a set of meanings or at least associations. They are ways of organizing our thinking.
–memes were pitched by Dawkins as the cultural, semantic equivalent of a gene, and in some way this is a lot like tropes. But I think of late the biological analogue to a meme is a virus; it’s the speedily-propagated repetition of an image, idea, plot. Meaning doesn’t really play into it (and this is embedded in Dawkins’ original notion)–or maybe it’s just that thinking plays a much smaller role. Memes are almost divorced from history or culture (or, like viruses, the specifics of the organism), they circulate as a result of medium and context, and they may have an impact on the organism (or culture), but they are not organizing concepts as much as uncannily repeatable notions.
Advertising slogans are memes, which lodge in the brain. They often rely upon familiar and compelling tropes, but their circulation can still be understood when detached from semantics or function. “Where’s the Beef?” was a meme — many made attempts to give it some cultural resonance, but its popularity and pervasiveness had little to do with the way it made us think. On the other hand, ads where hapless dads watch as children spill and spew, until moms come in with the right cleaning potion — those repeat longstanding tropes of gendered domesticity.
I’m not sure this is the “academic” take, or whether it’s even persuasive. And there’s probably a lot of use in rejecting my neat distinction, and emphasizing a much messier interrelationship between viral repetition and meaning-directed patterns.
Why the hell am I still up?
I don’t why you were still up, but that is very helpful indeed.
midnight is not too late to be up, mike! nice definitions. useful to me, too.
Hmmm… Even if you might more accurately call it a trope rather than meme, the word meme is now universally used when discussing the internet-based nugget (phrase, image, object) that passes along, mutating and evolving as it goes.
It is particularly fun when the mainstream world grabs hold of one of these things and misinterprets it, attempts of commodify it or completely misses the point. For example, there’s the recent fun involving the web’s rage guy.
knowyourmeme.com is an excellent storehouse of mems old and new.
And to watch memes be born and fight for survival in the wild, if you have the stomach for it, you can visit 4chan.org. I do not recommend that site for those easily offended, using a work computer or already facing pending charges of criminally lewd behavior.