The Nature & Propagation of memes

From Dawkins to Dankins…what evolved along the way?

Seen above. the quintessential troll face of meme culture. (Image credits “File:Trollface Non-Free.png.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 26 Aug. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trollface#/media/File:Trollface_non-free.png.)

By: Amy Peng, Journalist

“Free will is a myth. Religion is a joke. We are all pawns, controlled by something greater: Memes. The DNA of the soul. They shape our will. They are the culture–they are everything we pass on. Expose someone to anger long enough, and they will learn to hate. They become a carrier. Envy, greed, despair… All memes. All passed along…

You can’t fight nature, Jack. Wind blows, rain falls, and the strong prey upon the weak.”

-Monsoon, to Raiden, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeneance.

(Abstract) We know memes as the images or sped up videos with funny text as accompaniment. However, this is far from the original 1976 definition derived from Richard Dawkins. How did we get here? How did we evolve from the Dawkins definition, to this?

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” (from the Greek word “mimema”) as a cultural unit of information that spread through propagation from his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene“. He proposed them as the parallel to genes; more specifically, parallel to selfish genes in the manner that they control their own reproduction thus control their own end.

Memes can carry information, get replicated, and transmitted from person to person, undergoing evolution, mutating, and natural selection. However, Dawkins’ concept is still largely theoretical and controversial due to the implication that memes are selfish and the concept of culture evolution.

With culture, memes can take on ideas, skills, behaviors, or issues. Replication and transmission occurs when a person copies a unit of cultural information from another person, transmitted through verbal, visual, or electronic communication (i.e. conversation, email, or through the Internet). In the emerging 21st century, memes have turned into the funny images with text that we know now due to the pervasiveness of Internet culture and the propagation that memes now take thanks to the Internet.

CITATIONS

“Meme.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., www.britannica.com/topic/meme.

http://www.scielo.org.co/pdf/cesp/v6n2/v6n2a07.pdf