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.

One idea is that culture builds in a way similar to living things. An example would be how viruses spread to different organisms. Memes change as they go, creating controversy, and sculpting society. Just as a virus would, memes evolve from their state, being photoshopped, and exaggerated. Memes can be about anything.

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.

Examples of memes

• Technology: cars, paper-clips, etc. The progress of technology is a bit like genetics, because it has spread by 'mutations' or changes to progress. For example, many paper-clip designs have been made. Some last longer than others, and some look better than others. In the end the ones that are copied are a memetic success.
• Jokes spread and change the more they are told.
• Proverbs
• Gossip
• Nursery rhymes: passed on from parent to child over many generations (thus keeping old words such as "tuffet" and "chamber" popular when they are not used today).
• Epic poems: once important memes for preserving oral history; writing has largely superseded their oral transmission.
• Conspiracy theories
• Recipes
• Fashions
• Religions: complex memes, including folk religious beliefs, such as The Prayer of Jabez.
• Popular concepts: these include Freedom, Justice, Ownership, Open Source, Egoism, or Altruism
• Group-based biases: everything from anti-semitism and racism to cargo cults.
• Longstanding political memes such As "mob rule", national identity, Yes Minister and "republic, not a democracy".
• Programming paradigms: from structured programming and object-oriented programming to extreme programming.
• Internet phenomena: Internet slang. "Internet memes" propagate quickly among users using email, websites, blogs, discussion boards and other Internet communications as a medium.
• Moore's Law: this meme is particularly interesting. The original law was "semiconductor complexity doubles every 18 months". It described growth in terms of the number of transistors on a chip.
• Metameme: The concept of memes itself is a meme.
• Anecdotes: Short jokes or other stories.
• Phrases; and common expressions.
• Viral marketing: A type of marketing based on memes and using "word of mouth" to advertise (see the recent example of Snakes on a Plane).
• Chain-letters

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.

Related pages

• Figure of speech
• Internet meme
• Propaganda
• Rhetoric
• Self-replication
• Semiotics

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: Video from Ted Talks - February 2002.