What’s a Meme?
I saw this word used somewhere today and thought it was a strange one. The context in which it was used escapes me at the moment but I think it was used to describe something, eg, that is a meme. Anyway, I looked up the definition and it’s really quite cool.
WordNet over at princeton defines it this way:
meme — (a cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one generation to another by nongenetic means (as by imitation); “memes are the cultural counterpart of genes”)
How cool is that?
Some other noteworthy definitions floating around the internet:
- Nanotechnology Now
Meme: An idea that replicates through a society as it is propagated through person-to-person interaction, both direct and indirect. Memetics is a field of study that focuses on memes’ role in the evolution of a culture.
- Levity.com
A term coined by Richard Dawkins, who defines it as “a unit of cultural inheritance, hypothesized as analogous to the particulate gene and as naturally selected by virtue of its ‘phenotypic’ consequences on its own survival and replication in the cultural environment.”
- Silicon Beach Westnet
As defined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene(1976): “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” In this sense, chain letter components are memes.
- Access eGovernment
Contagious ideas. Term is used to explain viral marketing.
