Memes are a big part of our everyday lives. Whenever I open a social media app on my phone, they are always there. From spicy to relatable, from cute dogs to grumpy cats, from funny to depressing, there is a meme for everyone. It is a way for people from all around the world to connect and creates a sense of belonging in a larger internet culture. Their goal for creating memes is to share ideas, information or experiences with as many people as possible. I absolutely love memes and can spend countless hours sitting on the toilet seat scrolling through my phone and giggling like an idiot. Because of that, I had about a dozen ideas for the title of this blog (some examples include: Attack of the Memes, Memes…Memes Everywhere, Dank Memes for Culturally Aware teens etc etc). Instead, I chose to go with The Selfish Meme as a tribute to the book that first introduced the term meme: “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins.
Image obtained and edited from http://www.meditopia.org/images/selfish_gene_L.jpg
The word “meme” is derived from the Ancient Greek μιμητής (mimētḗs), which means “imitator” or “pretender”. It was conceived to represent a “unit of culture or information” like an idea, behaviour or belief that is “hosted” by the minds of one or more individuals and acts as the replicator of human cultural evolution. Memes can reproduce themselves by jumping from one mind to another, and making a copy of themselves there, whenever an individual influences someone else to adopt the same ideas as himself. A meme’s success and likelihood to be passed on will depend on how beneficial it is to the effectiveness and survival of its host. Dawkins did not provide a mechanism of how these memes control behaviour or culture, and he did not particularly care to since the focus of his book was genetics. In fact, even as his ideas spawned the new “science” of memetics and gained traction in the years to come, he personally didn’t bother that much with it.
Photograph obtain from Wikimedia Commons.
Nevertheless, in the 1980s until the early 2000s this theory grew massively in popularity. A Journal of Memetics was published online in 1997, sharing articles from supporters of this theory. Several books, written by people not even in the field, were also published in the 1990s and popularised this theory. Wanting to correct the “science” described in these books, psychologist Susan Blackmore published her own book, “The Meme Machine“, where she proposed her own ideas regarding memetics. She re-defined memes as any kind of information, like habits, songs, skills and stories, that gets copied from one person to another by imitation and teaching. She added that copies of memes are not always perfect, since they are copied with some variation and mistakes, like genes do with mutations. They also compete for space in our memory and for the opportunity to be copied again. As a result, only the most successful variations of a meme can survive. The combination of all these three factors are the same conditions set by Darwinian evolution: copies, variation and competition for survival. Therefore, memes and human culture can evolve.
However, the theory of memetics faced a lot of criticism and was described as a “pseudoscience” (“pseudo” = fake in Greek) by many since it didn’t propose a mechanism of how it affected and caused cultural evolution. People argued that even though it sounded like a nice concept, it should not be regarded as the truth because there was no evidence to back it up. As a result, the number of publications discussing this decreased dramatically in the following years, and even the Journal of Memetics sadly went ‘out of print’ in 2005 as this theory faded away.
He is still a supporter of memetics since he believes they are a philosophically useful tool, even if the theory is not that common in the scientific community anymore.
All credit belongs to its original creators of this video.
Memes eventually managed to make their way back to our lives, but to serve a different purpose than the one they were conceived for. Mike Godwin was the first to introduce memes as a term used to describe early internet trends in an issue of the Wired in 1993. Dawkins himself said that these memes are not the same as the ones he proposed since they are deliberately changed by humans to serve a purpose, instead of changing subconsciously and randomly. Nevertheless, this term caught on after a while as more and more people gained access to the internet and started making and sharing their own memes. PR companies, campaigners, and advertisers also use internet memes as a form of a cost-effective marketing. Memetic marketing, as it is now known, can generate buzz, trendiness and awareness about a product or person they are promoting, as people are more than willing to share online any meme they find funny.
If you are interested and wish to learn more:
- Dawkins, R., The Selfish Gene (1976)
- Blackmore, S., The Meme Machine (2000)
- For some quality meme content, visit 9gag and reddit.
Culturally Aware 
