Meme
Definition
A meme is a mind virus.[1]
Origin
Richard Dawkins coined the word in the final chapter of The Selfish Gene (1976). Having spent the book arguing that natural selection acts on replicators rather than on organisms, he asked whether the gene is the only replicator that exists, and proposed that cultural transmission provides another. He defined the meme as a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation, and offered as examples "tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches."
The word was constructed by shortening the Greek mimeme (something imitated) to a monosyllable resembling "gene," with an intended echo of "memory" and of the French même. Dawkins was explicit that the analogy was to be pressed only so far: memes replicate, vary and are selected, but the mechanisms of copying are far less faithful than in genetics.
The Virus Metaphor
The "mind virus" formulation belongs to the same lineage, developed by Dawkins in "Viruses of the Mind" (1993) and by others in the memetics literature of the 1990s. Its point is a shift of perspective: rather than asking why a person holds an idea, one asks what properties of the idea make it good at getting itself copied — which is a different question with different answers. An idea can spread because it is true, but it can also spread because it is memorable, emotionally arousing, easy to retell, socially advantageous to repeat, or bundled with an instruction to spread it.
The formulation is also where the concept attracts its strongest criticism. Treating ideas as parasites with interests of their own is a metaphor, and metaphors do not have mechanisms. Memetics as a research programme largely stalled: no one produced a satisfactory account of what the unit of a meme is, how it is bounded, how it is copied, or where it is stored, and the Journal of Memetics ceased publication in 2005. Anthropologists have generally objected that cultural transmission is a transformation rather than a copy — every retelling is a reconstruction — which undermines the replicator analogy at its foundation. Dan Sperber's epidemiology of representations offers the best-known alternative, treating cultural spread as a chain of inferences rather than of copies.
Internet Memes
The term's mass use now refers to a specific genre: images, videos, phrases and formats that spread online through imitation and deliberate variation. These are a genuinely useful case for the original theory, and an awkward one.
Useful, because the copying is observable. The spread of a format can be traced, dated and counted; the variations are preserved; the selection pressures — platform ranking, ease of remixing, legibility at a glance — are identifiable. Awkward, because the defining activity is not faithful replication but the opposite: an internet meme is a template that exists to be altered, and its fitness depends on how easily it can be made to carry a new joke. What propagates is a form, not a content, and the person copying it is not infected but authoring.
Related Reading
References
- ↑ Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, chapter 11, "Memes: the new replicators."
