meme
mēm/
noun
- an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.
- a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc. that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by Internet users.
An
Internet meme (
/ˈmiːm/ meem) is an activity, concept, catchphrase or piece of media which spreads, often as mimicry, from person to person via the
Internet.
[1] Some notable examples include posting a photo of people lying down in public places (called "
planking") and uploading a short video of people dancing to the
Harlem Shake.
A
meme is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture".
[2] An Internet meme may take the form of an
image,
hyperlink,
video,
picture,
website, or
hashtag. It may be just a word or phrase, including an intentional
misspelling. These small movements tend to spread from person to person via
social networks,
blogs, direct
email, or news sources. They may relate to various existing
Internet cultures or
subcultures, often created or spread on sites such as
Reddit,
Tumblr and numerous others, or by
Usenet boards and other such early-internet communications facilities. Fads and sensations tend to grow rapidly on the Internet, because the instant communication facilitates
word-of-mouth transmission.
The word "
meme" was coined by
Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book
The Selfish Gene, as an attempt to explain the way cultural information spreads;
[3] Internet memes are a subset of this general meme concept specific to the
culture and environment of the Internet. In 2013 Dawkins characterized an
Internet meme as being a meme deliberately altered by human creativity—distinguished from biological genes and Dawkins' pre-Internet concept of a meme which involved mutation by random change and spreading through accurate replication as in Darwinian selection.
[4] Dawkins explained that Internet memes are thus a "hijacking of the original idea," the very idea of a meme having mutated and evolved in this new direction.
[5]Further, Internet memes carry an additional property that ordinary memes do not—Internet memes leave a footprint in the media through which they propagate (for example, social networks) that renders them traceable and analyzable.
[6]
Internet memes seem to be a subset that
Susan Blackmore called
temes—memes which live in technological artifacts instead of the human mind.
[7]
