Genes: A Philosophical Inquiry

Graham, Gordon

doi:10.4324/9780203995112

Cited by 17 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…Some of these, commonly referred to as memes, become viral, evolve, and eventually enter popular culture. The term "meme" was first coined by Richard Dawkins [12], who framed them as cultural analogues to genes, as they too self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures [18]. Numerous memes have become integral part of Internet culture, with well-known examples including the Trollface [54], Bad Luck Brian [27], and Rickroll [49].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities

Zannettou

Caulfield

Blackburn

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018

214

232

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Internet memes are increasingly used to sway and manipulate public opinion. This prompts the need to study their propagation, evolution, and influence across the Web. In this paper, we detect and measure the propagation of memes across multiple Web communities, using a processing pipeline based on perceptual hashing and clustering techniques, and a dataset of 160M images from 2.6B posts gathered from Twitter, Reddit, 4chan's Politically Incorrect board (/pol/), and Gab, over the course of 13 months. We group the images posted on fringe Web communities (/pol/, Gab, and The Donald subreddit) into clusters, annotate them using meme metadata obtained from Know Your Meme, and also map images from mainstream communities (Twitter and Reddit) to the clusters.Our analysis provides an assessment of the popularity and diversity of memes in the context of each community, showing, e.g., that racist memes are extremely common in fringe Web communities. We also find a substantial number of politicsrelated memes on both mainstream and fringe Web communities, supporting media reports that memes might be used to enhance or harm politicians. Finally, we use Hawkes processes to model the interplay between Web communities and quantify their reciprocal influence, finding that /pol/ substantially influences the meme ecosystem with the number of memes it produces, while The Donald has a higher success rate in pushing them to other communities.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities

Zannettou

Caulfield

Blackburn

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018

214

232

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“…We have seen that misinformation (false information) has turned out to be not a type of information but rather pseudo-information. This is the Dretske-Grice approach (other philosophers who support a truth-based definition of semantic information are [5,31]):…”

Section: The Standard Definition Of Information Revisedmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Data to Semantic Information

Floridi

2003

Entropy

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Abstract:There is no consensus yet on the definition of semantic information. This paper contributes to the current debate by criticising and revising the Standard Definition of semantic Information (SDI) as meaningful data, in favour of the Dretske-Grice approach: meaningful and well-formed data constitute semantic information only if they also qualify as contingently truthful. After a brief introduction, SDI is criticised for providing necessary but insufficient conditions for the definition of semantic information. SDI is incorrect because truth-values do not supervene on semantic information, and misinformation (that is, false semantic information) is not a type of semantic information, but pseudo-information, that is not semantic information at all. This is shown by arguing that none of the reasons for interpreting misinformation as a type of semantic information is convincing, whilst there are compelling reasons to treat it as pseudo-information. As a consequence, SDI is revised to include a necessary truth-condition. The last section summarises the main results of the paper and indicates the important implications of the revised definition for the analysis of the deflationary theories of truth, the standard definition of knowledge and the classic, quantitative theory of semantic information.

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“…Each meme carries a unit of cultural information, that can be passed from person to person by the means of writing, speech, gestures and rituals. Memes can be regarded as sociocultural analogues to genes [12]. Indeed, just like genetic information undergoes a continuous process of evolution, so memetic information does.…”

Section: Musical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Stylistic Evolution of a Society of Virtual Melody Composers

Velardo

Vallati

2015

Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design

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Abstract. In the field of computational creativity, the area of automatic music generation deals with techniques that are able to automatically compose human-enjoyable music. Although investigations in the area started recently, numerous techniques based on artificial intelligence have been proposed. Some of them produce pleasant results, but none is able to effectively evolve the style of the musical pieces generated. In this paper, we fill this gap by proposing an evolutionary memetic system that composes melodies, exploiting a society of virtual composers. An extensive validation, performed by using both quantitative and qualitative analyses, confirms that the system is able to evolve its compositional style over time.

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Genes: A Philosophical Inquiry

Cited by 17 publications

References 1 publication

On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities

On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities

From Data to Semantic Information

On the Stylistic Evolution of a Society of Virtual Melody Composers

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