Why is meme called meme

He called it the meme, and it became his most memorable invention, far more influential than his selfish genes or his later proselytizing against religiosity. They compete with one another for limited resources: brain time or bandwidth. They compete most of all for attention. For example:. Whether an idea arises uniquely or reappears many times, it may thrive in the meme pool or it may dwindle and vanish.

The belief in God is an example Dawkins offers—an ancient idea, replicating itself not just in words but in music and art. The belief that Earth orbits the Sun is no less a meme, competing with others for survival.

Truth may be a helpful quality for a meme, but it is only one among many. Yet now millions of people have quite a clear idea—based on replicas of copies of rather poorly painted portraits.

Even more pervasive and indelible are the smile of Mona Lisa , The Scream of Edvard Munch and the silhouettes of various fictional extraterrestrials. These are memes, living a life of their own, independent of any physical reality.

Memes emerge in brains and travel outward, establishing beachheads on paper and celluloid and silicon and anywhere else information can go. They are not to be thought of as elementary particles but as organisms. The number three is not a meme; nor is the color blue, nor any simple thought, any more than a single nucleotide can be a gene. Memes are complex units, distinct and memorable—units with staying power. Also, an object is not a meme.

The hula hoop is not a meme; it is made of plastic, not of bits. When this species of toy spread worldwide in a mad epidemic in , it was the product, the physical manifestation, of a meme, or memes: the craving for hula hoops; the swaying, swinging, twirling skill set of hula-hooping.

The hula hoop itself is a meme vehicle. The moving image of the hula hooper seduced new minds by hundreds, and then by thousands, and then by millions. The meme is not the dancer but the dance. They achieve longevity through our pens and printing presses, magnetic tapes and optical disks. They spread via broadcast towers and digital networks. Memes may be stories, recipes, skills, legends or fashions. We copy them, one person at a time. This was not to suggest that memes are conscious actors; only that they are entities with interests that can be furthered by natural selection.

Their interests are not our interests. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor Rhyme and rhythm help people remember bits of text. Or: rhyme and rhythm help bits of text get remembered. Patterned language has an evolutionary advantage. Rhyme, rhythm and reason—for reason, too, is a form of pattern. I was promised on a time to have reason for my rhyme; from that time unto this season, I received nor rhyme nor reason.

Like genes, memes have effects on the wide world beyond themselves. In some cases the meme for making fire; for wearing clothes; for the resurrection of Jesus the effects can be powerful indeed. As they broadcast their influence on the world, memes thus influence the conditions affecting their own chances of survival.

The meme or memes comprising Morse code had strong positive feedback effects. Memes can replicate with impressive virulence while leaving swaths of collateral damage—patent medicines and psychic surgery, astrology and satanism, racist myths, superstitions and a special case computer viruses. Memes could travel wordlessly even before language was born.

Plain mimicry is enough to replicate knowledge—how to chip an arrowhead or start a fire. Among animals, chimpanzees and gorillas are known to acquire behaviors by imitation. Some species of songbirds learn their songs, or at least song variants, after hearing them from neighboring birds or, more recently, from ornithologists with audio players. Birds develop song repertoires and song dialects—in short, they exhibit a birdsong culture that predates human culture by eons. These special cases notwithstanding, for most of human history memes and language have gone hand in glove.

It supersedes mere imitation, spreading knowledge by abstraction and encoding. Perhaps the analogy with disease was inevitable. Before anyone understood anything of epidemiology, its language was applied to species of information. Dawkins needed a noun to describe this concept of the transmission of an idea. He initially toyed with the Greek word mimeme , meaning imitation, but he wanted something shorter that gestured to the English gene. He landed on meme. So, how did we get from that to… this?

Soon enough, people incorporated images into internet memes. Remember the Dancing Baby , that 3D rendering of a baby boogieing to a Swedish rock song? Today, many memes consist of an image with overlaid text, which can be altered.

McCulloch cites LOLcats as one of the earliest examples of an internet meme as we know it today. People repurposed the photo, and gave it new, specific life with every iteration.

This dictionary defines Dawkins' sense of meme as "an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture. Although Dawkins had coined the word in a book, it was more than 20 years before the accumulation of examples of the word in use demonstrated that it was a fully established term in the language.

Here's the kind of evidence that paved the way for the word's dictionary debut:. Memes are, simply put, ideas that catch on. This book is, not so simply, a collection of memes in essay form …, written by self-proclaimed off-planet journalist Rheingold.

Kinney, Booklist , 1 June I seem to have "inherited" two memes —bits of semantic or cultural heritage—from Anton the Smithy. The first was a kind of cynical pacifism, or what one might call an unashamed lack of patriotism. A decade into the future, and hiphop has thrown its code indiscriminately into the meme pool—it is immanent, endemic, ubiquitous. Once the meme is out there, it's very hard to quash.

No amount of evidence will stop a certain segment of the public from believing … — Michael Hirschorn, The Atlantic , November Graffiti have been the elemental memes of political speech, from the walls of Pompeii to the New York subways to the Berlin Wall, in all the oppressed countries of this world. But as all this meme use was going on, a new use was bubbling up—the one that in more recent years has become the dominant one. The first instance of this use that we were able to find in the Nexis database of thousands of mostly news publications is a interview on CNN:.

It worked. Now, zillions of the copies of the diapered dancer animate computer screens across the Internet. The particular meme discussed in the interview is believed my many to be the first meme, in the modern sense of the word. But it's interesting to note that, as with most other instances of the word in use for years to come, the example was seen as simply an iteration of the existing meaning. Like a lot of unsanitary places, 4chan is gloriously fertile.

What grows there is memes —ideas and jokes and fads that spread across the Net. Here's an example: there used to be a tradition on 4chan that every Saturday people would post pictures of cats. It was called Caturday. People added captions representing what the cat would say if cats could talk. Without knowing where it came from, somebody saw it and liked it enough to start a blog about it: icanhascheezburger.