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.

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* Epic poems: once important memes for preserving oral history; writing has largely superseded their oral transmission.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

## References 
## Literature 

# Aunger, Robert: *The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think*. Free Press, 2002, hardcover 
# Aunger, Robert: *Darwinizing culture: the status of memetics as a science*. Oxford University Press, 2000, New-York 
# Blackmore, Susan: *The Meme Machine*. Oxford University Press, 1999, hardcover , trade paperback , May 2000, 
# Fog, Agner: *Cultural Selection*. Dordrecht: Kluwer 1999. .
# 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
# Henson, H. Keith: "Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War."
# Lanier, Jaron: "The Ideology of Cybernetic Totalist Intellectuals ", an essay which criticises "meme totalists" who assert memes over bodies.
# "Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission"  *Journal of Memetics*
# *Principia Cybernetica* holds a lexicon of memetics concepts , comprising a list of different types of memes.
# A list of memetics publications on the web 

## 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.