the.com/memes
culture's copy-paste function, mutating a little each time it's pasted.
means an idea, image, or joke that spreads by imitation, remixing slightly with each retelling until it evolves.
from coined by richard dawkins in 1976's the selfish gene, from greek mimema, meaning imitated thing — he meant it for cultural units like tunes and phrases, decades before the internet turned it into cats with captions.
pre-internet memehappy birthday song is technically a meme
first image macrodebated, but bad luck brian era, mid-2000s
dawkins regrethe later said internet memes hijacked his term
academic fieldmemetics studies ideas like darwin studied species