Rating: 
Summary: good start...
Review: i urge you to check out Ian McFadyen's Mind Wars, an extension of memetics into 'tenetics'.
Rating: 
Summary: Memendel
Review: If Hamilton, Wilson, Dawkins, Dennett and Blackmore are the Lamarcks and Darwins of memetics - then Robert Aunger should be recognized as a new Mendel. The Electric Meme has for the first time established why we need a new form of "selfish" replicator to explain culture. In contrast to Sociobiology, Evolutionary Psychology and other scientific theories trying to explain how culture and eventually humans work - memetics, as outlined by R. Aunger, coresponds with facts and does not contradict itself. The book pinpoints for the first time where memes really are - namley only in brains - what they look like and how they replicate. But Aunger does more than this. By digging deep into how meme replication works - he uncovers new and facinating aspect of how replication works in general.
Rating: 
Summary: Aunger gets ahead of himself
Review: In this book Aunger tries to create a material, not metaphorical meme-an ELECTRIC MEME. His meme is a parasitic super replicator that uses the host brain to accomplish replication. He defines his meme as a millisecond neural tendency to spike across the brain's synaptic gaps. However it is well known that human consciousness requires hundreds of a second. This means that by the time one becomes aware of a meme's content it has already been replicated in one's brain. Before one becomes conscious of making a decision one's brain has already made it. Aunger suggests that free will can't survive the coming onslaught of neuroscientific advances-and if his idea holds water he might be right. Aunger got as far as discussing neurotransmitters and nitrous oxide ions that produce neuron firing. But he has limits to how fast and how tiny he wants to go. He stopped short of including the internal quantum measurement required by cells to replicate (as articulated by McFadden in QUANTUM EVOLUTION). Although he finishes by saying he'll accept either finding of whether memes exist or not, he first leads one through 300 repetitive pages of caring a lot. He tries to piggyback his idea of the electric meme on prion and computer virus replicators. Strange that with all he had to say of comp-virus he never once used the common term cellular automata. If you can plow through this book your IQ will increase by 1%.
Rating: 
Summary: Memetic Determinism??
Review: In this book Aunger tries to create a material, not metaphorical meme-an ELECTRIC MEME. His meme is a parasitic super replicator that uses the host brain to accomplish replication. He defines his meme as a millisecond neural tendency to spike across the brain's synaptic gaps. However it is well known that human consciousness requires hundreds of a second. This means that by the time one becomes aware of a meme's content it has already been replicated in one's brain. Before one becomes conscious of making a decision one's brain has already made it. Aunger suggests that free will can't survive the coming onslaught of neuroscientific advances-and if his idea holds water he might be right. Aunger got as far as discussing neurotransmitters and nitrous oxide ions that produce neuron firing. But he has limits to how fast and how tiny he wants to go. He stopped short of including the internal quantum measurement required by cells to replicate (as articulated by McFadden in QUANTUM EVOLUTION). Although he finishes by saying he'll accept either finding of whether memes exist or not, he first leads one through 300 repetitive pages of caring a lot. He tries to piggyback his idea of the electric meme on prion and computer virus replicators. Strange that with all he had to say of comp-virus he never once used the common term cellular automata. If you can plow through this book your IQ will increase by 1%.
Rating:
Summary: The Design of Communication
Review: In this excellent volume Aunger presents a clear and convincing argument. The meme is placed squarely in the brain, safely recreating itself, allowing all that goes on outside of the brain to be viewed in a fresh perspective. Aunger's clear explanations of concepts like signal correction, signal redundancy, and artifacts as repositories of memes should prove invaluable to those involved with the design of communication.
Rating: 
Summary: The difference between reality and metaphor
Review: In this meandering attempt to create a generalized theory of the meme the author piles his speculations and theories high. In the end the reader is left entirely convinced -- that there's no such thing as a meme outside of the world of metaphor.
Rating:
Summary: Culturing Culture
Review: No doubt about it--humans just plain have more culture (in a quantitative sense), than all Earth's other critters. How does this happen? How do ideas evolve? Is it something in our genes that makes us so, uh, special? Recognizing that there may be a non-genetic mechanism at work, Richard Dawkins conceived the "meme" (a word of his own coinage; it sounds like "gene") to account for this putative higher level of "replication". His concept, that things like ideas are literally part of evolutionary processes separate from those of genes, was first expounded in The Selfish Gene (1976), and more fully developed in The Extended Phenotype (1982). Now, as memetics is on the verge of coalescing into a full-blown, and possibly legitimate scientific discipline, one of its chief theoreticians, anthropologist Robert Aunger, has written The Electric Meme to bring us up to date, and, naturally, to promote his own suggestions for research directions. Here's my review, short form: The Electric Meme is an important and borderline superb work. This assessment demands an elaboration, of course, so, with a little preamble, I'll get right to the quibbles. On the assumption that it isn't sufficient to disseminate their ideas--their memes--merely to their professional colleagues (and, of course, fully aware of the commercial disadvantages of writing for a small, inbred market), many legitimate scientists often indulge in non-"journalese" writing styles, more or less intelligible to the "masses" of scientifically literate amateurs. Many of these writers--by way of famous example, the impassioned astronomer Carl Sagan; the aforementioned zoologist Richard Dawkins, he of the brilliant metaphor; and Dawkins' intellectual sparring partner, the prolific Paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould--have become wildly successful, their memes very high "fitness" indeed. The Electric Meme, though advertised as such, is not exactly a work of popular science. The target audience, as indicated both through content and style, is evidently more those academicians already familiar with the scholarly history of mimetics and the arcane elements of paradigm wars in the associated disciplines (particularly anthropology and psychology)--neither of which is especially compelling to non-combatant aficionados. And style! A dust jacket blurb alludes to "lively prose". Oh, lively, maybe, in an ivory tower sense. But for the rest of us, the reading us a bit of a slog: When will he get to the point? Okay, academese is a pet peeve of mine, and has been, well, since graduate school. But there is a deeper issue in this. A rigorous formalism is a desirable and necessary ingredient of meaningful scientific exegesis. However, it can be (and often is) used to separate the priestly caste from the popular "rabble". However, when one considers two apparent aspects of memes (neither of which Auger much considers), their recombinant manner of reproduction and their seeming r-strategist tendencies (i.e., in a literary culture, they disseminate profligately), such class differentiation can be a bad thing. Wide propagation of ideas is, of course, the rationale of popular science writing. Thus, to the extent that Aunger is a populist (a description I believe he would approve of), he is here less successful than many writers. To be fair, one does get the feeling that Aunger yearns to break out and say something important past those tempests in academic teapots. And, finally, a mere 50 pages from the end, he does just that: Human culture works because it is emergent (a trendy term that Aunger, to his credit, uses in appropriate moderation). Its artifacts and ideas are cumulative and interact in complex evolutionary ways with their mimetic "progenitors", so that the aggregate is vastly more that the sum of the parts. Aunger is not the first person to notice this (Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, in Figments of Reality, coin the fine, if somewhat corny term, "extelligence", to describe this phenomenon). But those readers who have stayed with the program are rewarded, and can now see the value of the preparatory work. In fact Aunger has "played" evolution theory with all the polyphonic intellectual virtuosity of a J.S. Bach four-part organ fugue. Though the development is a tad dry, the end result is masterful. In the end, we may not need memetics to account for culture, a possibility that Aunger is well aware of; perhaps another approach will be ultimately more useful. Still, the seeds of The Electric Meme, if sown on fertile soil, portend an extraordinary harvest. Of what fruit? We shall see.
Rating:
Summary: Give Electric Memes a chance
Review: The Electric Meme is a superb book. It is fresh, original, deep and entertaining. Memeticists should be truly grateful to Aunger (Richard Dawkins first in line) for giving memes the only reality they can possibly have. I am not (yet) a meme-believer myself, but I totally share Aunger's statement that "establishing whether memes exist is a scientific project of primary importance"(p.333). And I admire Aunger for saying "I will accept the conclusion of this project either way: memes or no memes". That's beautiful. From now on, if you want to talk about memes, pro or contra, you simply have to know what this book is saying. All that has been written so far is already pre-history.
Rating:
Summary: Instigation is double-speak
Review: This is a great book and models something totally different from what I conceived of as a meme. In fact, it redefines memes to something potentially relevant but even more inaccessible before. It's notion of what a "meme" is winds up being a tiny little fragment of a thought, so that something like a word or a idea or a sensation wouldn't actually be a meme, but a collection of them. My big gripe (but it isn't that big) is that when the author seeks to avoid the problems with how memes transfer between brains, he winds up saying that they don't - they merely create conditions suitable for the recreation of the meme in the other brain. From my point of view, this is double-speak - to paraphrase the book, it says something like "they're not being transferred, because there are problems with memes being transferred, but they are being transferred, but we're not calling it that". This would basically mean that memes don't really get transferred, and that there's a definite possibility of those conditions not leading to recreation of the meme in the other brain. I guess that's what happens when people "misunderstand" each other. I applaud him for realizing the value of context in understanding what a meme is - not just spatial and cognitive context, but also temporal context - but the "instigator" double-speak is enough to prevent me from calling this a five star. What I think he means is that memes can only be understood in their context and that meme transfer involves and requires significant amounts of common context in order to be successful. I wish he just said that instead of the rambling on-and-on about "instigators". This is definitely a book worth looking at. I wouldn't recommend reading the whole thing if you've read any other books on memes or memetics - just use the introduction and table of contents to determine the relevant chapters for you. The only people who should read the whole thing are patient people who haven't heard much about memetics or who don't mind re-reading much similar material.
Rating:
Summary: Takes the brain seriously
Review: This is certainly the most carefully thought out, best researched, most subtle and nuanced book ever written about memes. Of particular importance is Aunger's stress that cultural particulars (like ideas, beliefs, knowledge etc.) are brain states. At last we find the brain taken seriously. It is to be hoped that the standard of meme literature will continue to increase in sophistication as it has markedly done in Aunger's book.
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