Meme

A **meme** ( ) 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. Most memes are so called **dank** memes.

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- Epic poems: once important memes for preserving oral history; writing has largely superseded their oral transmission.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

## Related pages

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

## Literature

<div class="references-small">
1. Aunger, Robert: _The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think_. Free Press, 2002, hardcover
1. Aunger, Robert: _Darwinizing culture: the status of memetics as a science_. Oxford University Press, 2000, New-York
1. Blackmore, Susan: _The Meme Machine_. Oxford University Press, 1999, hardcover , trade paperback , May 2000,
1. Fog, Agner: _Cultural Selection_. Dordrecht: Kluwer 1999. .
1. 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 http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/cults.html
1. Henson, H. Keith: "Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War."
1. Lanier, Jaron: "The Ideology of Cybernetic Totalist Intellectuals ", an essay which criticises "meme totalists" who assert memes over bodies.
1. "Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission"  _Journal of Memetics_
1. _Principia Cybernetica_ holds a lexicon of memetics concepts , comprising a list of different types of memes.
1. A list of memetics publications on the web
</div>

## Other websites

- MemesJoke.com  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_
- 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 , a 2006 book on a memetic theory of mind.
- Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology  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
- A short piece by Mike Godwin on memes in Wired Magazine.
- The Invasion of the Memes  ─ 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  by Deepak Chopra
- "Life cycles of successful genes" , 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
- ,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.