What is a meme?
Glenn Grant: Meme (pron. meem): A contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern. (Term coined by Dawkins, by analogy with “gene”.) Individual slogans, catch-phrases, melodies, icons, inventions, and fashions are typical memes. An idea or information pattern is not a meme until it causes someone to replicate it, to repeat it to someone else. All transmitted knowledge is memetic. Tony Lezard: Richard Dawkins, who coined the word in his book The Selfish Gene defines the meme as simply a unit of intellectual or cultural information that survives long enough to be recognized as such, and which can pass from mind to mind. There’s not much of a sense of describing thought processes, but nor is it just a model. As Richard Dawkins writes (this is from memory), “God indeed exists, if only as a pattern in brain structures replicated across the minds of billions of people throughout the world
Dear Cecil: My boyfriend just told me about “memes,” the theory of which apparently involves looking at ideas as viruses that invade the human brain. Strong memes replicate, causing the ideas to spread from person to person, and you wind up with things like religion and professional sports. Please, Cecil, what’s the story on this? — Susan P., via the Internet The concept of memes is either really deep or really, really obvious. You can probably guess what side I initially came down on. But having studied the matter, I’m now obliged to say that I’m not so sure. The term “meme” (rhymes with “dream”) was coined by zoologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book about evolution, The Selfish Gene. Dawkins doesn’t claim genes are selfish in the same way as, say, kids who won’t share. Rather, he explains, the genes carried by each individual are the driving force behind evolution. As sentient beings we consider ourselves masters of our own fates, but in reality we’re just the battlebots in which c
By BRENT SILBY Department of Philosophy University of Canterbury Copyright Brent Silby 2000 www.def-logic.com/articles Memetics is rapidly becoming a discipline in its own right. Many web-sites are being devoted to the study of memetics, and new e-papers are appearing every day. With this in mind, I want to step back and have another look at what it is we are talking about. What is a meme? In the first section of this small e-paper, I’ll get back to basics and will offer a tangible definition of a meme. I will then move on to the next section and ask “what can we do with our knowledge of memes?” What is a Meme? Richard Dawkins first came up with the idea of a meme in his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene”. Essentially, memes are ideas that evolve according to the same principles that govern biological evolution. Think about all the ideas that you have in your head right now. They are all memes, and they all came from somewhere. Some of them will have come from friends and some will have come
” so here’s a more than a little information on that. I pronounce it so it’s rhymes with ‘dream’; some pronounce it so it sounds like ‘mem’ (from mem-ory). First off, technically most of the sites here are not memes. The fact that most of these sites create new questions all the time removes the whole evolving viral concept of a meme. But most people call them that and I liked the word ‘meme’ so I used meme. In the context of web logs / ‘blogs / blogging and other kinds of personal web sites it’s some kind of list of questions that you saw somewhere else and you decided to answer the questions. Then someone else sees them and does them and so on and so on. I generally consider these to be actual questions and not some multiple choice quizzes that determine some result at the end (what color you are most like, what cartoon character are you, what 80s movie are you). By some other definitions memes are viral and propagate around sometimes mutating as they propagate. Someone proposed some
