the.com/meme
a thought so contagious it mutates, breeds, and outlives the brain that made it
means A unit of culture — an idea, image, joke, or behavior — that spreads from person to person, especially the captioned images and viral jokes that replicate across the internet.
from Coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, who wanted a word for ideas that replicate and evolve much like genes do. He shaped it from the Greek 'mimema' (something imitated, related to 'mimeisthai,' to imitate) and deliberately clipped it to rhyme with 'gene.' For decades it lived in academic prose; the internet then took it literally, breeding it into the viral images it now mostly names.
- coined by
- Richard Dawkins in 1976, before the internet existed
- etymology
- from Greek mimema, meaning imitated thing
- first viral image
- dancing baby spread by email in 1996
- natural selection
- memes survive by being copied, not by being true
distracted boyfriend — photograph by antonio guillem in 2015, became the most shared image macro of the 2010s
loss — penny arcade webcomic strip #597 from 2008, spawned thousands of minimalist recreations
drake hotline bling — screenshot from drake's 2015 music video, used in millions of approval/disapproval comparisons
expanding brain — four-panel format originating circa 2017, illustrates escalating ideas from bad to absurd