Catchword Memes Theory Under The Perspective Of Chinese Network Research

Memetics is a newly developed theory that explaining the relations between things and thelaw of inheritance of cultural evolutionism from the point of horizontal and vertical view. Theconcept of Memetics is firstly proposed by the biologist of Oxford Richard Dawkins in1976. Itis regarded as a replicator of culture and it is a basic unit in cultural evolutionism which issimilar to the gene of genetics. And Memetics is a new theory explaining the law of culturalevolutionism based on Darwinian evolution. The core concept of Memetics is meme, and thecore concept of meme is imitation. Meme is copied and spread by imitation. We can say thatanything can be called meme if only it is copied and spread by imitation.Language is also selected, copied and spread in communication, so language is also a kindof meme phenomenon. Language is one of the carrier of meme, and meme can also promote theprosperity and development of the language. Popular network has very close relationship withmeme as a new language variation. It is also spread like virus and can be inherited and developedlike gene. At the same time, competition exists in network meme, who are trying to be acceptedand spread by the host (those who can accept the network meme) in order to become a stronglanguage meme. Memetics offers a new approach for analyzing and researching network, whichis valuable in theory and practices.This paper attempts to analyze the Chinese network with Memetics, trying to classify thenetwork and to summarize the features of network, to get some laws of network spread, hopingto offer some help for the study of network and the language meme. This is a challenging work,first of all, we must understand the theory of Memetics deeply, to reserve enough theorymaterials, then we can shoot the arrow at the target, to make Memetics and network combinewith each other better. Secondly, there are so many network in internet and they change everyday, so there are much work to do to collect the network.The paper is divided into six parts, the introduction portion introduces the research object,the aim and the significance of the paper, it also points out the methods and the corpus of thepaper.The second chapter introduces the concept of meme and memetics, and some other theoriesin relationship with meme.The third, forth and fifth chapter are the important part of the paper, in this part, the concept of the network is confined, we also analyze the types, features and formation process of thenetwork meme, then we analyze the culture influence of network.The last chapter that summarizes the acquisition and the shortcoming of the paper is theend.