Meme

This page is about cultural information. For memes related to the internet, see Internet meme.

A meme (/miːm/ meem) is an idea or belief which spreads because one person copies it from another.

Biologist and evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins invented the word meme in 1976. He said that tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothing fashions, ways of making pots, and the technology of building arches were all examples of memes.

Meme Media

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  Richard Dawkins coined the word meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.

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  "Kilroy was here" was a graffito that became popular in the 1940s, and existed under various names in different countries, illustrating how a meme can be modified through replication. This is seen as one of the first widespread memes in the world.

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  Imitating the cover of the Beatles album Abbey Road (1969), on which the band members cross the road in front of the Abbey Road Studios in a row, has become popular with fans and London visitors.

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  The four actresses of the Japanese media franchise Milky Holmes reenact the Beatles cover in 2010, extending the original Beatles meme by their film costumes.

Literature

1. Aunger, Robert: The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think. Free Press, 2002, hardcover ISBN 0-7432-0150-7
2. Aunger, Robert: Darwinizing culture: the status of memetics as a science. Oxford University Press, 2000, New-York ISBN 0-19-263244-2
3. Blackmore, Susan: The Meme Machine. Oxford University Press, 1999, hardcover ISBN 0-19-850365-2, trade paperback ISBN 0-9658817-8-4, May 2000, ISBN 0-19-286212-X
4. Fog, Agner: Cultural Selection. Dordrecht: Kluwer 1999. ISBN 0-7923-5579-2.
5. Henson, H. Keith: "Sex, Drugs, and Cults. An evolutionary psychology perspective on why and how cult memes get a drug-like hold on people, and what might be done to mitigate the effects", The Human Nature Review 2002 Volume 2: 343-355 [1]
6. Henson, H. Keith: "Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War."
7. Lanier, Jaron: "The Ideology of Cybernetic Totalist Intellectuals", an essay which criticises "meme totalists" who assert memes over bodies.
8. "Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission" Archived 2001-12-21 at the Wayback Machine Journal of Memetics
9. Principia Cybernetica holds a lexicon of memetics concepts, comprising a list of different types of memes.
10. A list of memetics publications on the web Archived 2004-12-24 at the Wayback Machine

Other websites

• MemesJoke.com Archived 2020-06-30 at the Wayback Machine 4chan.org and Reddit.com, where memes and are distributed, to users of the internet.
• The Meme Machine, Interview of Susan Blackmore by Denis Failly
• Journal of Memetics Archived 2008-01-13 at the Wayback Machine
• The text of Dawkins' Selfish Gene, chapter 11, "Memes: the new replicators", in which Dawkins coined the word "meme"
• The Mocking Memes: A Basis for Automated Intelligence Archived 2019-06-14 at the Wayback Machine, a 2006 book on a memetic theory of mind.
• Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology Archived 2006-10-25 at the Wayback Machine by Jack Balkin which uses memes to explain the growth and spread of ideology.
• Why did the chicken cross the road? The story of a meme Archived 2015-09-24 at the Wayback Machine
• A short piece by Mike Godwin on memes in Wired Magazine.
• The Invasion of the Memes Archived 2015-03-08 at the Wayback Machine ─ memes as a useful metaphor, nothing more.
• What is a Meme? by Brent Silby ─ an introductory article pitched at a general audience.
• A discussion of memes Archived 2011-08-06 at the Wayback Machine by Deepak Chopra
• "Life cycles of successful genes" Archived 2015-12-26 at the Wayback Machine, 2003, Robert Hoffmann
• Memes.org ─ Just relaunched as a forum for discussion about memes and memetics.
• Dawkins's speech on the 30th anniversary of the publication of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins 2006
• "A Memetic Paradigm of Project Management"PDF,Whitty 2005
• The Evolution of Technology by Brent Silby ─ memetics used to explain human creativity.
• "Evolution and Memes: The human brain as a selective imitation device": article by Susan Blackmore.
• Dan Dennett discusses Memes Archived 2008-05-15 at the Wayback Machine: Video from Ted Talks - February 2002.