What Is A MEME?

By: Michael Maeltzer, Carly Ringo, Andy Estabrook, and Michael Segoviano

REPLICATION

GENE

NATURAL SELECTION

MEME

CULTURE

Richard Dawkins

A meme is a “a unit of cultural transmission”

In other words, a meme is an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture

Examples of Memes

Stories

Skills

Habits Songs

Inventions

PicturesGestures

Videos

Phrases

MEMES ARE LIKE GENES

Memes are replicators

They have the ability to be passed from one individual to another, or between groups of individuals

“Memes appeared in human evolution when our ancestors became capable of imitation. From this time on, two replicators memes and genes coevolved.”

“The copying of memes from one person to another is imperfect, just as the copying of genes from parent to child is sometimes inaccurate”

SUSAN BLACKMORE

The replication process of memes relies on our ability to imitate, or reproduce, the meme in question. This process is not perfect and as a result…

“Whenever people copy skills, habits or behaviors from one person to another by imitation, a new replicator is at work.”

“Most important is that memes compete with other memes and produce memetic evolution, the results of which then

affect the selection of genes.”

SUSAN BLACKMORE(CONTINUED)

Digital Culture

Internet Meme

Virality

Limor Shifman

“No matter how you might be able to conceptualize cultural phenomena in biological terms you can independently conceptualize them in social terms ”

According to John Wilkins:

Vehicles reproduce but only genes replicate

WHAT AFFECTS THE POTENTIAL SURVIVAL AND

TRANSMISSION OF MEMES?

longevity: the longer any instance of the replicating pattern survives, the more copies can be made of it

fecundity: the faster the rate of copying, the more the replicator will spread

copying-fidelity: the more accurate or faithful the copy, the more will remain of the initial pattern after several rounds of copying

Affordances of MemeCirculation

“A ‘meme pool’ is an accumulation of ‘memes’ in a society and functions like a gene pool.”

“Meme media technologies, when applied to Web contents, open a new vista especially in the circulation and reuse of scientific knowledge.”