So I want all the folks who graduated high school and college prior to 1977 who know what a meme is to raise their hands! Did lots of hands go up! If they did then you’re better than me. Until I read Richard Dawkins The God Delusion I did not know about memes. But now after reading that book and Book Number for 2011 Virus of the Mind by Richard Brodie I know a little more about this basic unit of cultural transmission and imitiation and memetics which is the study of the working of memes, how they interact, replicate and evolve. A meme (rhymes with cream) is an idea that forms itself into a distinct memorable unit and then is spread through a culture. They are the cultural equivalent of the gene. The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. Memes can exist concerning any thing in life like danger, fear, sex and religion. Those that are best at replicating themselves keep evolving while others don’t far as well and are replaced. An example would be the Roman and Greek Gods for many years their memes were strong and dominated the culture but when science explained things they lost their ability to replicate and soon faded. Likewise religions like Mithra-ism a and other pagan religions flourished and died, while the memes of Christianity and Islam continued to replicate and be spread.
Memes can include anything like “Things go better with Coke” or other advertising slogans that have infected us and are spred throufhout the cultural. Memes do not have to be necessarily good for you, just good at replicating themselves!
The book was a good start at looking at memes and I want to explore the subject in more depth, possibly in books like The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore. Richard Brodie writes well for the common man and I just picked up his first book Getting Beyond OK at the library today. Brodie wrote the original version of Microsoft Word during his years at Microsoft. Now I have to get cracking on some mysteries as the non-fiction has surpassed the fiction for the first time in a long, long time.