Memes, tropes, and frames
« previous post | next post »
In a workshop over the weekend at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, one of the presentations was based on a paper by Dan Kahan et al., "Culturally antagonistic memes and the Zika virus: an experimental test", Journal of Risk Research 2017. The abstract starts this way [emphasis added]:
This paper examines a remedy for a defect in existing accounts of public risk perceptions. The accounts in question feature two dynamics: the affect heuristic, which emphasizes the impact of visceral feelings on information processing; and the cultural cognition thesis, which describes the tendency of individuals to form beliefs that reflect and reinforce their group commitments. The defect is the failure of these two dynamics, when combined, to explain the peculiar selectivity of public risk controversies: despite their intensity and disruptiveness, such controversies occur less frequently than the affect heuristic and the cultural cognition thesis seem to predict. To account for this aspect of public risk perceptions, the paper describes a model that adds the phenomenon of culturally antagonistic memes – argumentative tropes that fuse positions on risk with contested visions of the best life. Arising adventitiously, antagonistic memes transform affect and cultural cognition from consensus-generating, truth-convergent influences on information processing into conflictual, identity-protective ones.
During the discussion, someone remarked in passing that these things are properly not memes or tropes but rather frames. What follows is a bit of idle lexicographic investigation into this terminological tangle.
The OED on meme:
1976 R. Dawkins Selfish Gene xi. 206 The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme… It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’. Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.
The OED on trope:
Etymology: Probably partly < (i) classical Latin tropus figure of speech, in post-classical Latin also chant, melody (6th cent.), phrase, sentence, or verse, usually sung, used as an embellishment to mass or divine office (frequently from 11th cent. in British and continental sources),
I.1.a. Rhetoric. A figure of speech which consists in the use of a word or phrase in a sense other than that which is proper to it. Hence (more generally): a figure of speech; (an instance of) figurative or metaphorical language.
The OED gives 22-odd senses for frame, but none of them directly reference the specific sense developed in Gregory Bateson's 1972 Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Erving Goffman's 1974 book Frame Analysis.
From Bateson 1972:
(a) Psychological frames are exclusive, i.e., by including certain messages (or meaningful actions) within a frame, certain other messages are excluded.
(b) Psychological frames are inclusive, i.e., by excluding certain messages certain others are included. […]
(c) Psychological frames are related to what we have called "premises." The picture frame tells the viewer that he is not to use the same sort of thinking in interpreting the picture that he might use in interpreting the wallpaper outside the frame. […]
(d) In the sense of the previous paragraph, a frame is metacommunicative. Any message, which either explicitly or implicitly defines a frame, ipso facto gives the receiver instructions or aids in his attempt to understand the messages included within the frame.
(e) The converse of (d) is also true. Every meta-communicative or
metalinguistic message defines, either explicitly or implicitly, the set
of messages about which it communicates, i.e., every metacommunicative message is or defines a psychological frame.
From Goffman 1974:
And of course much use will be made of Bateson's use of the term "frame." I assume that definitions of a situation are built up in accordance with principles of organization which govern events — at least social ones — and our subjective involvement in them; frame is the word I use to refer to such of these basic elements as I am able to identify. That is my definition of frame. My phrase "frame analysis" is a slogan to refer to the examination in these terms of the organization of experience.
Meme and trope have migrated out of the realm of academia into popular culture, as signaled by sites like TV tropes and Know your meme. This hasn't happened to the same extent with frame, perhaps because there are so many vaguely similar ordinary-language meanings.
What did Kahan et al. mean by meme? From the paper:
[A] general sample of US subjects, whose cultural orientations were measured with the Cultural Cognition Worldview Scales, formed polarized affective reactions when exposed to information that was pervaded with antagonistic memes linking Zika to global warming; when exposed to comparable information linking Zika to unlawful immigration, the opposing affective stances of the subjects flipped in direction.
So the idea is that there are argument patterns of the form "Global warming causes bad thing X" or "Illegal immigration causes bad thing X", each of which ties the evaluation of X's risk to a complex of issues associated with group identity, thereby engaging the process of "cultural cognition".
So are these argument patterns tropes, memes, or frames?
They're not really tropes in the sense of "figures of speech", since this seems tied to figurative interpretations of specific words and phrases. Liddell & Scott give a sense "in Logic, mode or mood of a syllogism […]: more generally, method of instruction or explanation, […] ; mode of inference" for the Greek word τρόπος (whose basis meaning is "turn, direction, way, manner, fashion, guise") — but this seems more general and abstract than patterns like "Global warming causes bad thing X". Still, maybe it's fair to extend trope figuratively to cover argument templates of that kind.
Such argument patterns fit pretty well into Dawkins list of meme examples: "tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches". Then again, there's not much that's thereby excluded.
Are these argument patterns frames? Well, some of Bateson's description seems to fit: "Any message, which either explicitly or implicitly defines a frame, ipso facto gives the receiver instructions or aids in his attempt to understand the messages included within the frame." But again, this doesn't exclude much either.
So it seems to me that all of the three words fit to some extent. But Kahan's goal is to find a new technical term for a new concept; and "antagonistic meme" seems as likely go viral as any of the obvious alternatives.
Gwen Katz said,
March 13, 2017 @ 8:35 am
The usage I see nowadays of both "trope" and "meme" has drifted far enough away from the given definitions, as indicated by the linked sites, as to render those definitions functionally obsolete, at least in my conversational circles. "Meme" usually means an image macro, which is, I guess, a subset of Dawkins' definition, but it would sound very odd to use the term to refer to ways of making pots. (I've only seen the Dawkins definition come up in discussions of Dawkins himself.)
Meanwhile, "trope" is used to mean pretty much any classifiable device or element used in any kind of fictional media, including rhetorical devices but also including, say, a dozen different types of anime breasts. But it typically refers specifically to fiction, so it doesn't work very well for describing a real-life phenomenon.
So I think "frames" is definitely the best choice in this case.
John Roth said,
March 13, 2017 @ 9:45 am
Yeah, the TV Tropes site is a good source for the way the word is used in the fiction-writing business. It seems to be a kind of plot element, frequently unintended. It's the only meaning of the word I know; the others cited are simply not in my working vocabulary.
TV Tropes is also an incredible time-waster.
What's being discussed seems to fit into the conventional use of the term "frame," in the sense of "framing the discussion." The metaphor is to put a frame around the discussion so you get the interpretation you want. Framing is incredibly important for political and advertising messaging.
Bill Benzon said,
March 13, 2017 @ 10:22 am
Yes, trope has drifted from its original meaning (which I learned years ago as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins). & TV Tropes is an interesting site, though, yes, it can be a time sink.
Meme is tricky. Dan Dennett and others do use it as a term of art in the study of cultural evolution, where, however, it is controversial. Popular usage is derived Dawkins. Back in 2012 Jeremy Burman published a fascinating article on the history of the idea in which he argues that it was Dennett who drove the popularization of the idea. My sense is there is a sort of continuum between the most popular versions, which are untethered to anything other than examples, through various pop-science accounts, and on to investigators trying to make serious use of the idea.
For the last several years Dennett's been giving lectures in which he announces, without any attempt at argument, that words are the most important memes. He also likens memes to computer viruses (a usage he has from Dawkins) and to Java apps. I think this is nonsense, but that's a discussion for another time.
Jerry Friedman said,
March 13, 2017 @ 10:38 am
Gwen Katz: "Meme" usually means an image macro
Now in a very extended sense of "macro".
J.W. Brewer said,
March 13, 2017 @ 11:26 am
The broader possibly-not-captured-in-dictionary-definition sense of "trope" that makes it roughly synonymous with the pre-internet-image meaning of "meme" was already floating around when I was in college in the mid-'80's, most commonly among the sorts of people whose academic focus had exposed them to Foucault, Derrida, and similar trendy French dudes. By contrast the comparatively few people who I can recall who were already using "meme" back then were typically from the nerdy-and-good-with-computers subset of campus society, which didn't have much overlap with the po-mo-jargon enthusiasts in those days. That those nerdy-marginal types would have a disproportionate influence in the subsequent development of vernacular English because of being heavily represented in the early users of the internet, which would turn out to be a very important conduit for disseminating lexical innovation, is an obvious-in-hindsight factor that probably none of us in my sociolinguistics class had the imagination to foresee. I guess if you'd been reading George Lakoff's early popularizing books instead of reading Foucault or Dawkins you might have preferred "frame," but I don't think there was any identifiable subculture organized around Lakoff-reading.
Bill Benzon said,
March 13, 2017 @ 11:55 am
Meme is tricky. Dan Dennett and others do use it as a term of art in the study of cultural evolution, where, however, it is controversial. Popular usage is derived Dawkins. Back in 2012 Jeremy Burman published a fascinating article on the history of the idea in which he argues that it was Dennett who drove the popularization of the idea. My sense is there is a sort of continuum between the most popular versions, which are untethered to anything other than examples, through various pop-science accounts, and on to investigators trying to make serious use of the idea.
For the last several years Dennett's been giving lectures in which he announces, without any attempt at argument, that words are the most important memes. He also likens memes to computer viruses (a usage he has from Dawkins) and to Java apps. I think this is nonsense, but that's a discussion for another time.
Dan Romer said,
March 13, 2017 @ 12:37 pm
Another way to think of the type of discourse reflected in toxic memes was presented by another group at the meeting who cataloged the amount of blaming that accompanied the Zika outbreak. This "blame discourse" is quite common in intergroup relations when people have agendas that associate problems with outgroups. Toxic memes in the context of an epidemic are any discourse that attempts to cast blame for the epidemic on the actions of particular groups, such as immigrants (who bring the epidemic to us) or climate change deniers (who prevent us from stopping the epidemic). As is often the case, blame discourse diverts attention from the real problem (mosquitoes carrying a virus) to a different agenda.
Andrew (not the same one) said,
March 13, 2017 @ 4:12 pm
When I first came across memes on the internet they were typically quizzes or questionnaires; someone would post them and say 'Do this meme'. This was confusing enough to one used to the Dawkinsian sense – though, like the images, they are memes in the Dawkinsian sense, but only as one sort of thing among many. Quite how it moved from there to typically meaning images, I'm not sure.
Rod Johnson said,
March 13, 2017 @ 4:22 pm
The use of "frame" in linguistics I primarily associate with Chuck Fillmore's Frame Semantics, and also with the related idea of a subcategorization frame, both instances of objects being understood in terms the associated knowledge or expectations (encyclopedic knowledge, arguments, what have you) they bring along with them. I think a general term that encompasses many things of this kind might be schema.
AntC said,
March 13, 2017 @ 5:11 pm
What did Kahan et al. mean by …
This paper is so stuffed-full of sociological gobbledegook, I think Kahan et al are failing to mean anything at all by vast gobbets of it. The abstract in particuar seems to suffer from a high incidence of noun pile-ups: "public risk perceptions" is how many ways ambiguous?
They do define their usage of both meme and trope (pp 4-5). So I think that's the least problematic part of exegesis.
Did the workshop manage to obtain any sense out of the paper? Or was the linguistic discussion in lieu of that?
[(myl) The workshop was about communication and perception of risks and responses to the Zika virus, and there were 14 presentations, of which Dan Kahan's was one. I've always found his work clear and convincing, and this presentation was no exception.
The basic (and initially counterintuitive) result is that when you look at the interaction among logical reasoning ability, general scientific knowledge, and political polarization, you find that people with better reasoning ability and better command of the facts are more polarized than people who score less well on reasoning and relevant general knowledge, not less polarized. Dan has a story to tell about why this is true — or maybe a couple of stories — but the phenomenon seems to be pretty robust, and was replicated in the study reported in the paper I cited.]
Guy said,
March 14, 2017 @ 2:15 am
AntC,
Did you consider the possibility that your inability to understand the paper was not a consequence of it being unintelligible, but of you not being sufficiently acquainted with the subject matter? If so, on what basis did you conclude against it?
mike said,
March 14, 2017 @ 4:39 am
Isn't this sense of "frame" what Lakoff was talking about in "Don't Think of an Elephant"?
January First-of-May said,
March 14, 2017 @ 8:34 am
"Meme" usually means an image macro, which is, I guess, a subset of Dawkins' definition, but it would sound very odd to use the term to refer to ways of making pots. (I've only seen the Dawkins definition come up in discussions of Dawkins himself.)
In the Russian online community, a meme is any kind of commonly quoted phrase or structure (which doesn't necessarily have to appear in image macros) – much like the definition used in Know Your Meme – and an image macro is a demotivator.
Mind you, as bad of a fit the word "meme" is for describing image macros, it's probably a better fit than "demotivator".
I agree, however, that I can't recall ever seeing anything remotely resembling the Dawkins definition outside discussions of Dawkins specifically (and, I suppose, now this thread).
Incidentally, I also like the choice of "frame", since it brings to mind useful associations of "framing in the context of" – not sure if this meaning is listed among the 22 senses in OED (it appears to be verb sense 7 and noun sense 6 on Wiktionary).
D.O. said,
March 14, 2017 @ 9:31 pm
But is "image macro" itself a meme, a trope, or a frame?
D.O. said,
March 14, 2017 @ 9:32 pm
Or better yet, is "meme" a meme, is "trope" a trope, is "frame" a frame?
Edwin Schmitt said,
March 15, 2017 @ 12:59 pm
I am a bit surprised that the concept of ideology has not come up in this discussion. In other articles Kahan has repeatedly used ideology to describe some of the concepts that are captured by the words "meme" or "trope" in this paper. Kahan is well versed in the literature that has moved the study of ideology away from the "false consciousness" definition and more towards a set of interconnected symbolic concepts that structure thought, perception and action. He most likely interprets frames in the Batesonian sense as more of an outgrowth of ideology; in other words frames are what does the structuring or guiding of risk perception, but they are not exactly the symbolic set that Kahan et al seem to be describing in this paper. I am not sure it is a good idea to describe that symbolic set as "memes" or "tropes", especially since there is already a fairly dense set of jargon used by linguistic anthropologists who focus on analyzing ideology (see for instance the work of Susan Gal and others at U Chicago http://anthropology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty_member/susan_gal/). I notice that the concept of meme is much better explained in the text (p. 4-5) than the concept of trope. It is not apparent from the literature they are engaged with, but it is possible that they are thinking of "trope" in the sense James Fernandez used to develop his Trope Theory (http://home.uchicago.edu/~jwf1/TropeTheory.htm). Ultimately, my guess is that Kahan moved away from the more abstract concept of ideology towards these supposedly more specific concepts of memes and tropes because of the backgrounds of his co-authors. However, I completely agree with Mark that all four authors probably recognized that the phrase "antagonistic meme" is likely to be a crowd favorite in the ivory-tower.
JChance said,
March 17, 2017 @ 5:08 pm
I'd say my understanding of the popular sense of "meme" is closer to January's statement. If I had to nail it down, I would say "a running joke with snowclonelike elements of repetition", although there are elements of something older and closer to Dawkins, "anything designed to attain viral popularity by reuse rather than just discussion and linking".
JPL said,
March 18, 2017 @ 3:14 am
The term ‘meme’ has taken on a life of its own, but this post raises some interesting questions, focusing on the term ‘meme’ as coined and used by Dawkins. Dawkins seems to be concerned with processes of cultural transmission driven by imitation, which I have always used the term ‘cultural mimesis’ to refer to. (I’m not sure why Dawkins needed a term for the idea of a “unit” of cultural transmission or imitation, minimal, contrastive or otherwise; and is he talking about the perceivable part of the unit or the part that is understood?)
The interesting question for me, admittedly tangential to the present post, has to do with Bloomfield’s and Pike’s original distinction between –etic and –emic levels of analysis as applied to phonetics (narrow transcription) and phonology (sound systems) on the one hand, and on the other the sense of ‘-eme’ in the terms ‘phoneme’ vs. ‘morpheme’. Bloomfield, in his “Set of postulates” (1926) defines ‘morpheme’ as “a recurrent (meaningful) form which cannot in turn be analyzed into smaller recurrent (meaningful) forms”, i.e., a “minimum form”. The meaning of this minimum form he called a ‘sememe’. Later (1933) he used the term ‘episememe’ to refer to what in 1926 he called (presumably minimal) ‘constructional meaning’, i.e., the meanings of minimal units of grammatical form. The question has to do with apparent conflicts between atomistic approaches to understanding languages and more structuralist, in the broader Kantian sense, ways of describing them. Was the problem of the logical and descriptive incompleteness and inconsistency of this terminological system ever addressed and resolved?
Bill Benzon said,
March 18, 2017 @ 4:42 am
"…is he talking about the perceivable part of the unit or the part that is understood?"
That's not clear in Dawkins' original formulation and has been a matter of considerable discussion among memeticists. Dennett has said it's all 'information' so it doesn't make any difference which it is, but he clearly things memes are in people's heads.
J.W. Brewer said,
March 19, 2017 @ 2:49 pm
To the extent Dawkins' perhaps now-lost notion of "meme" was as a minimum unit, not susceptible of further analysis, one needs a way to talk about how those minimum units combine (molecules rather than atoms (the old-timey atoms from before when we knew about subatomic particles and quarks and so on); compound words and sentences rather than bare morphemes, etc.). I was just reminded of that by this interesting passage in a piece from last year that was understandably getting some renewed attention in the last 24 hours:
"Let’s assume all the individual components of rock shatter and dissolve, leaving behind a hazy residue that categorizes rock ’n’ roll as a collection of memorable tropes. If this transpires, historians will reconstitute the genre like a puzzle. They will look at those tropes as a suit and try to decide who fits that suit best. And that theoretical suit was tailored for Chuck Berry’s body." — from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/magazine/which-rock-star-will-historians-of-the-future-remember.html
"Suit" is sort of a nonce metaphor here, but it does seem like it would be useful to have a word (maybe "frame" would be a good one, but maybe not) for that sort of meaningful assemblage of multiple tropes/means where the simultaneous presence of all (or at least most of them) is diagnostic of something in a way that the presence of one or two wouldn't be.
Bill Benzon said,
March 20, 2017 @ 6:01 am
In a comment up above I linked to Jeremy Burman's fascinating article on the history of the idea. Here's a recent interview with Burman where he talks about that article. Among other things, he says: