Est-ce que les memes, ça peut être juste un mot ou ça peut être plus gros comme une histoire complète ?
Memes as discrete units

Dawkins initially defined meme as a noun that "conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation ". John S. Wilkins retained the notion of meme as a kernel of cultural imitation while emphasizing the meme's evolutionary aspect, defining the meme as "the least unit of sociocultural information relative to a selection process that has favorable or unfavorable selection bias that exceeds its endogenous tendency to change". The meme as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless of whether that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme. A meme could consist of a single word, or a meme could consist of the entire speech in which that word first occurred. This forms an analogy to the idea of a gene as a single unit of self-replicating information found on the self-replicating chromosome.

While the identification of memes as "units" conveys their nature to replicate as discrete, indivisible entities, it does not imply that thoughts somehow become quantized or that " atomic " ideas exist that cannot be dissected into smaller pieces. A meme has no given size. Susan Blackmore writes that melodies from Beethoven 's symphonies are commonly used to illustrate the difficulty involved in delimiting memes as discrete units. She notes that while the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony () form a meme widely replicated as an independent unit, one can regard the entire symphony as a single meme as well.

The inability to pin an idea or cultural feature to quantifiable key units is widely acknowledged as a problem for memetics. It has been argued however that the traces of memetic processing can be quantified utilizing neuroimaging techniques which measure changes in the "connectivity profiles between brain regions". Blackmore meets such criticism by stating that memes compare with genes in this respect: that while a gene has no particular size, nor can we ascribe every phenotypic feature directly to a particular gene, it has value because it encapsulates that key unit of inherited expression subject to evolutionary pressures. To illustrate, she notes evolution selects for the gene for features such as eye color; it does not select for the individual nucleotide in a strand of DNA. Memes play a comparable role in understanding the evolution of imitated behaviors.

Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process (1981) by Charles J. Lumsden and E. O. Wilson proposes the theory that genes and culture co-evolve, and that the fundamental biological units of culture must correspond to neuronal networks that function as nodes of semantic memory. Lumsden and Wilson coined their own word, culturgen, which did not catch on. Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.

At present, the existence of discrete cultural units which satisfy memetic theory has been challenged in a variety of ways. What is critical from this perspective is that in denying memetics unitary status is to deny a particularly fundamental part of Dawkins' original argument. In particular, denying memes are a unit, or are explainable in some clear unitary structure denies the cultural analogy that inspired Dawkins to define them. If memes are not describable as unitary, memes are not accountable within a neo-Darwinian model of evolutionary culture.

Within cultural anthropology, materialist approaches are skeptical of such units. In particular, Dan Sperber argues that memes are not unitary in the sense that there are no two instances of exactly the same cultural idea, all that can be argued is that there is material mimicry of an idea. Thus every instance of a "meme" would not be a true evolutionary unit of replication.

Dan Deacon, Kalevi Kull separately argued memes are degenerate Signs in that they offer only a partial explanation of the triadic in Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic theory: a sign (a reference to an object), an object (the thing being referred to), and an interpretant (the interpreting actor of a sign). They argue the meme unit is a sign which only is defined by its replication ability. Accordingly, in the broadest sense, the objects of copying are memes, whereas the objects of translation and interpretation are signs. Later, Sara Cannizzaro more fully develops out this semiotic relation in order to reframe memes as being a kind of semiotic activity, however she too denies that memes are units, referring to them as "sign systems" instead.

In Limor Shifman's account of Internet memetics, she also denies memetics as being unitary. She argues memes are not unitary, however many assume they are because many previous memetic researchers confounded memes with the cultural interest in "virals": singular informational objects which spread with a particular rate and veracity such as a video or a picture. As such, Shifman argues that Dawkins' original notion of meme is closer to what communication and information studies consider digitally viral replication.
Un mème internet, ou simplement mème, est un élément culturel qui se propage via Internet, souvent par le biais de plateformes de médias sociaux, telles que YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, etc. Les mèmes internet peuvent prendre diverses formes, telles que des images, des vidéos, des GIFs et d'autres phénomènes viraux. Les caractéristiques des mèmes incluent leur propension à la parodie, leur utilisation de l'intertextualité, leur propagation selon un schéma viral et leur évolution au fil du temps. Le terme est issu du concept de mèmes proposé par Richard Dawkins en 1972. Mike Godwin a inventé l'expression « mème internet » en 1993 lorsqu'il a évoqué les mèmes se propageant via des forums de discussion, des groupes Usenet et par e-mail. Avec l'essor des plateformes de médias sociaux telles que YouTube, Twitter, Facebook et Instagram, les mèmes sont devenus plus diversifiés et peuvent se propager rapidement. Les genres plus récents incluent les mèmes « dank » et surréalistes, ainsi que les vidéos de courte durée telles que celles publiées sur Vine et TikTok. Les mèmes sont considérés comme une partie importante de la culture internet et sont devenus un domaine de recherche développé. Ils apparaissent dans un large éventail de contextes, tels que le marketing, l'économie, la finance, la politique, les mouvements sociaux, la religion et les soins de santé. Bien que certains soutiennent que les mèmes méritent une protection au titre de l'usage loyal, l'utilisation de médias provenant d'œuvres préexistantes peut parfois entraîner des problèmes de droits d'auteur.
### Query ###
Est-ce que les memes, ça peut être juste un mot ou ça peut être plus gros comme une histoire complète ?

### Main Text ###
Memes as discrete units

Dawkins initially defined meme as a noun that "conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation ". John S. Wilkins retained the notion of meme as a kernel of cultural imitation while emphasizing the meme's evolutionary aspect, defining the meme as "the least unit of sociocultural information relative to a selection process that has favorable or unfavorable selection bias that exceeds its endogenous tendency to change". The meme as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless of whether that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme. A meme could consist of a single word, or a meme could consist of the entire speech in which that word first occurred. This forms an analogy to the idea of a gene as a single unit of self-replicating information found on the self-replicating chromosome.

While the identification of memes as "units" conveys their nature to replicate as discrete, indivisible entities, it does not imply that thoughts somehow become quantized or that " atomic " ideas exist that cannot be dissected into smaller pieces. A meme has no given size. Susan Blackmore writes that melodies from Beethoven 's symphonies are commonly used to illustrate the difficulty involved in delimiting memes as discrete units. She notes that while the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony () form a meme widely replicated as an independent unit, one can regard the entire symphony as a single meme as well.

The inability to pin an idea or cultural feature to quantifiable key units is widely acknowledged as a problem for memetics. It has been argued however that the traces of memetic processing can be quantified utilizing neuroimaging techniques which measure changes in the "connectivity profiles between brain regions". Blackmore meets such criticism by stating that memes compare with genes in this respect: that while a gene has no particular size, nor can we ascribe every phenotypic feature directly to a particular gene, it has value because it encapsulates that key unit of inherited expression subject to evolutionary pressures. To illustrate, she notes evolution selects for the gene for features such as eye color; it does not select for the individual nucleotide in a strand of DNA. Memes play a comparable role in understanding the evolution of imitated behaviors.

Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process (1981) by Charles J. Lumsden and E. O. Wilson proposes the theory that genes and culture co-evolve, and that the fundamental biological units of culture must correspond to neuronal networks that function as nodes of semantic memory. Lumsden and Wilson coined their own word, culturgen, which did not catch on. Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.

At present, the existence of discrete cultural units which satisfy memetic theory has been challenged in a variety of ways. What is critical from this perspective is that in denying memetics unitary status is to deny a particularly fundamental part of Dawkins' original argument. In particular, denying memes are a unit, or are explainable in some clear unitary structure denies the cultural analogy that inspired Dawkins to define them. If memes are not describable as unitary, memes are not accountable within a neo-Darwinian model of evolutionary culture.

Within cultural anthropology, materialist approaches are skeptical of such units. In particular, Dan Sperber argues that memes are not unitary in the sense that there are no two instances of exactly the same cultural idea, all that can be argued is that there is material mimicry of an idea. Thus every instance of a "meme" would not be a true evolutionary unit of replication.

Dan Deacon, Kalevi Kull separately argued memes are degenerate Signs in that they offer only a partial explanation of the triadic in Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic theory: a sign (a reference to an object), an object (the thing being referred to), and an interpretant (the interpreting actor of a sign). They argue the meme unit is a sign which only is defined by its replication ability. Accordingly, in the broadest sense, the objects of copying are memes, whereas the objects of translation and interpretation are signs. Later, Sara Cannizzaro more fully develops out this semiotic relation in order to reframe memes as being a kind of semiotic activity, however she too denies that memes are units, referring to them as "sign systems" instead.

In Limor Shifman's account of Internet memetics, she also denies memetics as being unitary. She argues memes are not unitary, however many assume they are because many previous memetic researchers confounded memes with the cultural interest in "virals": singular informational objects which spread with a particular rate and veracity such as a video or a picture. As such, Shifman argues that Dawkins' original notion of meme is closer to what communication and information studies consider digitally viral replication.

### Supplementary Text ###
Un mème internet, ou simplement mème, est un élément culturel qui se propage via Internet, souvent par le biais de plateformes de médias sociaux, telles que YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, etc. Les mèmes internet peuvent prendre diverses formes, telles que des images, des vidéos, des GIFs et d'autres phénomènes viraux. Les caractéristiques des mèmes incluent leur propension à la parodie, leur utilisation de l'intertextualité, leur propagation selon un schéma viral et leur évolution au fil du temps. Le terme est issu du concept de mèmes proposé par Richard Dawkins en 1972. Mike Godwin a inventé l'expression « mème internet » en 1993 lorsqu'il a évoqué les mèmes se propageant via des forums de discussion, des groupes Usenet et par e-mail. Avec l'essor des plateformes de médias sociaux telles que YouTube, Twitter, Facebook et Instagram, les mèmes sont devenus plus diversifiés et peuvent se propager rapidement. Les genres plus récents incluent les mèmes « dank » et surréalistes, ainsi que les vidéos de courte durée telles que celles publiées sur Vine et TikTok. Les mèmes sont considérés comme une partie importante de la culture internet et sont devenus un domaine de recherche développé. Ils apparaissent dans un large éventail de contextes, tels que le marketing, l'économie, la finance, la politique, les mouvements sociaux, la religion et les soins de santé. Bien que certains soutiennent que les mèmes méritent une protection au titre de l'usage loyal, l'utilisation de médias provenant d'œuvres préexistantes peut parfois entraîner des problèmes de droits d'auteur.

### Draft ###

Query: "Est-ce que les memes, ça peut être juste un mot ou ça peut être plus gros comme une histoire complète ?"

Translation: "Can memes be just one word or can they be bigger like a complete story?"

Key semantic: "gros comme une histoire complète" → implies size hierarchy, narrative scope.

### 1. Definitional Framework

"Meme" - Dawkins 1976. Cultural transmission unit.
But what constitutes "meme" varies wildly across scholarship:

Traditional memetics: discrete replicators. Gene↔Meme analogy.
Modern internet studies: viral phenomena, networked cultural objects.

? Definitional fluidity creates analytical problem.

### 2. Size Spectrum Analysis

**Micro-memes:**
- Single words (adjectives, exclamations)  
- Hashtags
- Abbreviations
- Isolated phrases

**Meso-memes:**
- Short narratives
- Image macros
- Video snippets
- Song fragments

**Macro-memes:**
- Complete stories/narratives
- Viral campaigns
- Social movements
- Cultural phenomena spanning time

### 3. Internet Context Shift

Traditional memetics: replication-focused, discrete units.
Internet culture: propagation patterns matter more than discrete boundaries.

Viral transmission ≠ strict replication.
Cultural remixing creates hybrid forms.

### 4. Key Tensions

● **Unitary status problem:** No clear demarcation criteria.
● **Scale ambiguity:** "Meme" spans word→movement.  
● **Evolutionary logic:** Selection pressures operate at multiple levels.

∴ Answer depends on theoretical framework adopted.

**Memetic theory approach:** Hierarchical organization, but discrete units still exist.

**Network culture approach:** Fluid phenomena, boundaries dissolve.

**Internet studies approach:** Context-dependent definition, scale irrelevant to transmission success.

### 5. Practical Resolution

Internet memes operate across spectrum. Size determined by:
- Transmission medium
- Cultural context  
- Evolutionary fitness
- Audience engagement

Single words can meme (viral hashtags, catchphrases).
Complete narratives can meme (viral videos, social movement stories).

! Key insight: "Meme" as umbrella term encompassing diverse phenomena. Scale determined by cultural transmission dynamics rather than inherent properties.

**Physical constraint check:** ✓ Internet enables both micro- and macro-scale cultural transmission. Attention economy favors diverse formats.

**Logical constraint:** ✓ If memes = cultural replicators, then any culturally transmissible unit qualifies regardless of size.

**Multi-hop reasoning:** Cultural transmission + selection + variation + heredity = meme phenomena. Size irrelevant to evolutionary process.

Final answer: Memes can span from single words to complete narratives. Scale determined by cultural transmission patterns rather than inherent properties. Definitional flexibility allows both micro-level discrete units and macro-level complex phenomena to qualify as memes within different theoretical frameworks.

### Answer###
Les mèmes peuvent effectivement être aussi petits qu'un seul mot ou aussi grands qu'une histoire complète - il n'y a pas de taille fixe pour un mème. 

Cette question touche directement à la définition même du concept. Un mème peut théoriquement consister en un mot isolé, ou il peut s'agir d'un discours entier dans lequel ce mot apparaît pour la première fois. Cette flexibilité reflète la nature évolutive des mèmes culturels.

Historiquement, l'idée de mème a été développée pour servir d'analogie aux gènes - des unités de transmission culturelle qui se comportent de manière similaire aux gènes dans le processus évolutif. De la même manière qu'une gène n'a pas de taille particulière et que l'évolution agit sur des traits généraux plutôt que sur des gènes individuels, les mèmes peuvent être compris comme des unités culturelles qui peuvent s'étendre d'un seul mot à une symphonie entière.

Cette approche permet de saisir la complexité de la transmission culturelle, où des éléments aussi variés que les mélodies de Beethoven ou les vidéos virales sur internet peuvent tous fonctionner comme des mèmes selon les contextes et les processus de diffusion.