the word meme is ubiquitous these days, and so it may come as a surprise that the word is a neologism coined by richard dawkins, first used in his 1976 book ‘the selfish gene’. a shorting of mimeme, (the ancient greek for to imitate), the word is modelled after the word ‘gene’.

meme is defined by the OED as “an element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means.” dawkins defines a meme as a cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator.

memes need a host in order to survive and to replicate. it is essential that a meme is transmitted to other hosts if it is to survive beyond the lifespans of the host. if a human host were to die without the meme having being transmitted, then the meme would also die.

memes as a replicator have a high fidelity chance of being propagated, though like genes, they vary in their ability to replicate. analogous to genes, memes are sometimes not perfectly replicated, and can sometimes mutate. whereas genes survive and mutate through the process of biological evolution, memes do so through the evolution of culture. memes that replicate successfully survive- whereas genes that don’t wither and ‘die’. they are subject to a form of natural selection. dawkins states that although there must be a replicator at the base of darwinian selection, it needn’t be dna, and offers up the meme as a potential alternative.

memes act as a viral phenomenon. for most of human history they were transmitted primarily by ‘word of mouth’, by people who were in physical proximity to one another. memes therefore compete for bandwidth, for space, in the mind of the host. memes can also be replicated and survive through inanimate media, such as books, the internet and anywhere that information can be stored.

memes may have certain qualities that aid in their survival and replication, in the same way that living organism do. a ‘catchy’ tune will replicate more successfully than an ‘uncatchy’ one, for example. “the song is stuck in my head”, is a commonly heard sentence.

these qualities may be beneficial, inconsequential or even pathogenic towards the host. memetic success and genetic success are not one and the same. some memes, such as the learned skill of fire-starting, have proven to be massively beneficial to the survival of humans. because of this the meme was transmitted widely, replicating successfully to this day. the development of technologies has given memes more hosts within which to replicate and spread. the meme can replicate much faster by radio and television that it ever could by ‘word of mouth’.

the use of the word meme online varies somewhat from dawkins’ original definition. whereas a meme defined by dawkins mutates by a form of darwinian selection, an internet meme is altered deliberately by humans. though the usage is not that far away from the original.

“it’s anything that goes viral. in the original introduction to the word meme in the last chapter of the selfish gene, i did actually use the metaphor of a virus. so when anybody talks about something going viral on the internet, that is exactly what a meme is and it looks as though the word has been appropriated for a subset of that.” – richard dawkins

the internet, as a global interconnect network, has become a natural home for memes to thrive- replicating at speeds never before seen, from one ip address to another. a meme can now successfully replicate across most of the earth in a matter of hours or less.

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