Meme is a unit of expression that has cultural meaning and spreads from person to person. Some memes are light-hearted, such as jingles, catch-phrases, and cute or funny pictures on the internet . Others are more serious, such as religious doctrines or political attacks. A meme may spread through word of mouth or through media, including books , television , and the internet. The word meme comes from the Greek word mimeme, which means to imitate.
The British biologist Richard Dawkins popularized the term in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins compared memes to biological genes , which replicate (copy themselves) as they spread. Dawkins claimed that memes share a number of similarities with genes. Both memes and genes are subject to mutations (changes) because they do not replicate perfectly. For example, a person may modify a joke or idea upon repeating it. Dawkins also claimed that memes, like genes, do not necessarily have to benefit their “host” body to spread widely. The study of memes, called memetics, became popular in the 1990’s as a way to understand the evolution of human culture.
The term meme became even more widespread in the 1990’s and 2000’s as people increasingly shared ideas, jokes, and other memes over the internet. Such internet memes as lolcats and doges—which feature pictures of cats and dogs with absurd, ungrammatical text—have become part of popular culture. Some memes are said to “go viral” if they become popular quickly, likening their spread to that of biological viruses . Unlike other forms of media, the internet makes it easy to track the spread of a meme—for example, by counting visits to a website or times that a meme is shared on social networks. However, the concept of memes has limited acceptance in the academic community.
