What are memes
What are memesWhat are Memes?
A "meme" is an idea which can be passed from person to person, the basic unit of cultural transmission. Memes are often analogized to genes, as self replicating information patterns; or to viruses, organic or computer, which prosper by infecting new hosts (in this case human minds) with copies of themselves. The term was invented by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene.
What are some examples of memes ? Things like Rollerblading, Forrest Gump, the WWWeb, skinny half-decaf double lattes at Starbucks, flat tax...20th century things like the New York Yankees, World Wars, Gershwin , cyberspace and classic things like: the bible, folk dances,Y2K, recipes, respect for elders, nodding to say yes, French, Beethoven's Fifth symphony.... Dawkins believed that ideas, habits, behavioral norms etc undergo the same evolutionary struggle and adaptation that the genes in Darwin's Galapagos beasts underwent. A meme, therefore is a unit of cultural transmission, struggling to keep a place in an ever changing world.
How do memes work ? Think of your mind as an environment. A new idea arrives: "make your own bread with a breadmaker." Your neighbor’s mind environment may love Wonderbread, and be very hostile to breadmaking. However, he may fervently believe that OJ is innocent. You, on the other hand, may have a mind environment where breadmaking thrives, along with "OJ was guilty". So we see that a meme is nothing more than a pattern of information, one that happens to have evolved a form which induces people to repeat that pattern. Typical memes include individual slogans, ideas, catch-phrases, melodies, icons, inventions, and fashions. It may sound a bit sinister, this idea that people are hosts for mind-altering strings of symbols, but in fact this is what human culture is all about.
As a species, we have co-evolved with our memes. Imagine a group of early Homo Sapiens in the Late Pleistocene epoch. They've recently arrived with the latest high-tech hand axes and are trying to show their Homo Erectus neighbors how to...
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