You're going to hate this, but foundationally I don't see a lot of daylight between memes and words. Both are packets of meaning. Both can be ambiguous and open to interpretation. The meaning of both can and does change over time. The meaning of both can and does vary by the social context and experience of the consumer.
You can argue one difference is that words have the support of their fellows words surrounding them on either side to add context and clarify meaning, and I'll agree there. But it that really "worse" or just "different"?
I will say that the aforementioned isolation and lack of surrounding context fuels what I believe is your biggest complaint, which is the speed and fluidity with which their meaning changes and morphs in real time. As well as their ability to take on different parallel meanings in different social contexts in the same moment in time.
1. Why would I hate that? It's your view; it seems honest; it's not as if I have some reservoir of expertise that allows me to say, "no you're wrong." I'm used to having minority opinions. In my experience, my opinions/intuitions are more often right than wrong, but "more often" is the key word there. I also try to change my views when the shortcomings of my previous view is evident.
Sometimes I push back hard on criticism -- not because I hate it, but because I'm stress testing. Is my view really wrong? Let's see what happens when I try to answer objections. It doesn't mean that I won't change my view ever, or even that I'm not already subtly reshaping it.
My intuition says that there's still a big difference between language and memes used as they are. But that's not necessarily correct. It's interesting to see so much pushback from the board.
2. Yes, I think it's the last point -- the different parallel meanings. But it's more than just that --it's unconstrained meanings. It's one thing for a set of words to have multiple different meanings to people. Conservatives interpret "content of character, not color of skin" in a very different way than I do. I think their view is wrong, but it's coherent. It's a multi-polar world.
Memes, by contrast, seem to be more fundamentally like smears. As I analogized before: language is electron orbitals. Maybe someone sees the electron in a 1s valence shell; someone else sees 2p. But there are a finite number of discrete options. Memes are like continuous probability, which means that they mostly introduced unshaped noise to conversations.
More importantly, I think, memes are obfuscating by nature. My personal complaint is that when someone uses one, I often have no real idea what is being conveyed -- there are multiple options and I can't decide which was intended (especially when they are not accompanied by any text). But I think a more natural interpreter is still only going to recover the intended meaning with, say, 90% accuracy. And someone else might also be at 90%, but a different 90. And then they use the meme based on that understanding, which introduces more glitches. After a few generations of this, the meme can mean almost anything and nobody's comprehension is very good.
That is, people think they know what it means but maybe their actual grasp of the intended meaning is less.
This seems like a death knell of communcation.
3. I don't think that there's a categorical difference between memes and language; only that the former amplifies the non-clarity in the latter, considerably.
