What is a meme?
WHAT IS A MEME? When Richard Dawkins introduced the word “meme” in his book The Selfish Gene, he had the glimmering of a concept in mind — a replicator akin to the gene that would be at the center of the evolution of culture the way genes are at the center of the evolution of organisms. Since then, there has been a great deal of thought from many camps as to the nature of the meme. Does it have a physical existence? Does a meme in your head remain constant, or does it change over time? Are words written down on paper memes. or are memes only memes when they’re in your mind? Since we want to come up with a useful definition for meme, there is no True answer to these questions. While researching Virus of the Mind, I read and spoke with many thinkers about memes. The most useful definition seemed to be the one I called “A Working Definition” in Virus of the Mind: A meme is a unit of information in a mind whose existence influences events such that more copies of itself get created in oth
