Overused Memes and Misunderstood Memes
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Olivia Gulin, from Know Your Meme, has shown what a meme actually is.
"The idea and word 'meme' were coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. He writes about an approach to evolution that takes the gene as its most important unit, rather than groups of organisms. The gene, for Dawkins, ultimately acts in pure self-interest.
A “meme” is analogous to a “gene” as a unit of culture that replicates itself, spreads throughout culture, and mutates. He writes:
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 ----- or ----, 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. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: `… memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.(3) When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn’t just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, “belief in life after death” is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.’"
Now, what this means is that a meme isn't just a picture with some font added to it. It's pretty much everything you do. For example, take what you say to your friends and family. They might say what you said to others, then those others might say that to others. See? A meme is more than just a picture. It's actually anything that passes on from on thing to another, mentally and physically.And that, my friends, is my first ever blog rant.
Additional Details
| Tags: | Memes, Overuse, Meme Overuse, Meme, Troll, Rick Roll, Swagger, Brink, Volus, Marmot, Jeff, Jim, Burgesse, Meme Blog, Blog, Article |
| Credit: | Know Your Meme |
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ITS OVA NINE THOUSAND!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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