Related papers: On Selfish Memes
The rise of social media platforms has brought about a new digital culture called memes. Memes, which combine visuals and text, can strongly influence public opinions on social and cultural issues. As a result, people have become interested…
Research in cultural evolution aims at providing causal explanations for the change of culture over time. Over the past decades, this field has generated an important body of knowledge, using experimental, historical, and computational…
The analysis of the creation, mutation, and propagation of social media content on the Internet is an essential problem in computational social science, affecting areas ranging from marketing to political mobilization. A first step towards…
Much work in the space of NLP has used computational methods to explore sociolinguistic variation in text. In this paper, we argue that memes, as multimodal forms of language comprised of visual templates and text, also exhibit meaningful…
The theory of natural selection cannot describe how early life evolved, in part because acquired characteristics are passed on through horizontal exchange. It has been proposed that culture, like life, began with the emergence of…
Image-with-text memes combine text with imagery to achieve comedy, but in today's world, they also play a pivotal role in online communication, influencing politics, marketing, and social norms. A "meme template" is a preexisting layout or…
We present a theory of cultural evolution based upon a renormalization group scheme. We consider rational but cognitively limited agents who optimize their decision making process by iteratively updating and refining the mental…
The aim of this article is to address the question of the endogenization of mimetic processes in formal models of social systems. Starting from some studies about cognitive differences between humans and animals, we propose a formal…
This paper outlines the implications of neural-level accounts of insight, and models of the conceptual interactions that underlie creativity, for a theory of cultural evolution. Since elements of human culture exhibit cumulative, adaptive,…
Memes are one of the most ubiquitous forms of social media communication. The study and processing of memes, which are intrinsically multimedia, is a popular topic right now. The study presented in this research is based on the Memotion…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
Image memes have become a widespread tool used by people for interacting and exchanging ideas over social media, blogs, and open messengers. This work proposes to treat automatic image meme generation as a translation process, and further…
We introduce a novel evolutionary algorithm (EA) with a semantic network-based representation. For enabling this, we establish new formulations of EA variation operators, crossover and mutation, that we adapt to work on semantic networks.…
Templatic memes, characterized by a semantic structure adaptable to the creator's intent, represent a significant yet underexplored area within meme processing literature. With the goal of establishing a new direction for computational meme…
The automatic identification of harmful content online is of major concern for social media platforms, policymakers, and society. Researchers have studied textual, visual, and audio content, but typically in isolation. Yet, harmful content…
Imitation is fundamental in the understanding of social system dynamics. But the diversity of imitation rules employed by modelers proves that the modeling of mimetic processes cannot avoid the traditional problem of endogenization of all…
Culture is not just traits but a dynamic system of interdependent beliefs, practices and artefacts embedded in cognitive, social and material structures. Culture evolves as these entities interact, generating path dependence, attractor…
This paper presents a speculative model of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the transition from episodic to mimetic (or memetic) culture with the arrival of Homo erectus, which Donald [1991] claims paved the way for the unique features…
It has been proposed that cultural evolution was made possible by a cognitive transition brought about by onset of the capacity for self-triggered recall and rehearsal. Here we develop a novel idea that models of collectively autocatalytic…
Greater theorizing of methods in the computational humanities is needed for epistemological and interpretive clarity, and therefore the maturation of the field. In this paper, we frame such modeling work as engaging in translation work from…