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In the field of memetics, a metameme (or meta-meme) is a meme about a meme. The concept of memes themselves has been called "the Metameme".^[1] Ideological tolerance and the rhetorical device of metaphor are metamemes.^[1] Tolerance is:

A meta-meme which confers resistance to a wide variety of memes (and their sociotypes), without conferring meme-allergies. In its purest form, Tolerance allows its host to be repeatedly exposed to rival memes, even intolerant rivals, without active infection or meme-allergic reaction. Tolerance is a central co-meme in a wide variety of schemes, particularly "liberalism", and "democracy". Without it, a scheme will often become exo-toxic and confer meme-allergies on its hosts. Since schemes compete for finite belief-space, tolerance is not necessarily a virtue, but it has co-evolved in the ideosphere in much the same way as co-operation has evolved in biological ecosystems. (Henson.)^[1]

Metamemes have recentlyCategory:All articles with vague or ambiguous timeCategory:Vague or ambiguous time from March 2026^[when?] attracted new attention, and the terminology around them has evolved significantly.Category:All articles with unsourced statementsCategory:Articles with unsourced statements from May 2024^{[citation needed]}

Measuring social evolution

Metamemes may be used to measure the evolution of a given society. It has been proposedCategory:All Wikipedia articles needing clarificationCategory:Wikipedia articles needing clarification from May 2024^[vague] that the degree of consciousness a society has about the very memes that form it is correlated with how evolved that society is. The difficulties associated with measuring the "metamemetic content" of a given society, however, render that proposition impractical.Category:All articles with unsourced statementsCategory:Articles with unsourced statements from May 2024^{[citation needed]}

This can be viewed (to some extent) as a memetic approach to the American sociologist Gerhard Lenski's view that the more information a given society has, the more advanced it is.Category:All articles with unsourced statementsCategory:Articles with unsourced statements from May 2011^{[citation needed]}

See also

• Memeplex, Memetics and memetic engineering — examples of concepts that are meta-memes

References

External links

• Definition - MetaMeme.org
• Freinacht, Hanzi (2020). What Is a Metameme?