People added captions representing what the cat would say if cats could talk. Here's an example: there used to be a tradition on 4chan that every Saturday people would post pictures of cats. What grows there is memes-ideas and jokes and fads that spread across the Net. Like a lot of unsanitary places, 4chan is gloriously fertile. But it's interesting to note that, as with most other instances of the word in use for years to come, the example was seen as simply an iteration of the existing meaning. The particular meme discussed in the interview is believed my many to be the first meme, in the modern sense of the word. LEFERVE: Net meme-the Wired Style guide calls a meme a "contagious idea." JANELLE BROWN, WIRED NEWS: And the next thing you know, his friends have forwarded it on and it's become a net meme. Now, zillions of the copies of the diapered dancer animate computer screens across the Internet. LEFERVE: Girard created the baby to show off his animation software. MICHAEL GIRARD, UNREAL PICTURES: The dancing baby actually goes actually goes back to an initial cha-cha motion that I created as a demo file years ago. GREG LEFERVE, CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Who is this tyke, slashing his air guitar, dancing the boogaloo (ph) and haunting "Ally McBeal?" He's a figment of Michael Girard's imagination. The first instance of this use that we were able to find in the Nexis database of thousands of mostly news publications is a 1998 interview on CNN: 2011 The Internet and a New Meaning of 'Meme'īut as all this meme use was going on, a new use was bubbling up-the one that in more recent years has become the dominant one. Salem, The New York Times Magazine, 17 Apr. Graffiti have been the elemental memes of political speech, from the walls of Pompeii to the New York subways to the Berlin Wall, in all the oppressed countries of this world. Michael Hirschorn, The Atlantic, November 2010 No amount of evidence will stop a certain segment of the public from believing … Once the meme is out there, it's very hard to quash. 1993Īnd as the years went on, we continued to see the same kind of use:
#HAVE A NICE LIFE MEME CODE#
Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger II, 1991Ī decade into the future, and hiphop has thrown its code indiscriminately into the meme pool-it is immanent, endemic, ubiquitous. The first was a kind of cynical pacifism, or what one might call an unashamed lack of patriotism. I seem to have "inherited" two memes-bits of semantic or cultural heritage-from Anton the Smithy. This book is, not so simply, a collection of memes in essay form …, written by self-proclaimed off-planet journalist Rheingold. Memes are, simply put, ideas that catch on. Here's the kind of evidence that paved the way for the word's dictionary debut: Although Dawkins had coined the word in a 1976 book, it was more than 20 years before the accumulation of examples of the word in use demonstrated that it was a fully established term in the language.
#HAVE A NICE LIFE MEME UPDATE#
This dictionary defines Dawkins' sense of meme as "an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture." The word wasn't entered until 1998, when it earned a spot in an update of the Tenth Edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'.ĭawkins went on to describe what exactly the word was intended to refer to:Įxamples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory,' or to the French word même. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. In Dawkins' conception of the term, it is "a unit of cultural transmission"-the cultural equivalent of a gene: Meme isn't new: it dates to evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene, where it functioned with a meaning other than its current most common one.
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