Fun With Memes

 

Fun With Memes (Illustrated)

By Daniel Rigney

 



Most of us have heard the word “meme” bandied about. As originally defined by biologist Richard Dawkins, a meme is any item of culture that can be reproduced or replicated and passed on from one person to another. Hawkins proposed that memes are like the genes of culture, evolving through a process of mutation and selection much as genes do in biological evolution. In The Selfish Gene (1976), he writes:

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. 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.

In recent years, the term has come to be somewhat trivialized and (Dawkins says) “highjacked” by netizens who use it much more narrowly to refer to clever images, such as a pictures or videos of cute kittens, that mutate and spread, sometimes virally, through the Internet for the amusement of culture consumers.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that (a Seinfeld meme).

Now I discover there are meme generators on the web that permit us all to create our own Internet memes and blast them into the blogosphere. One such generator, makeameme.org, offers a free, newbie-friendly way to add a caption to any of several standard meme images to make y0ur own attempts at mimetic humor.

Here are a few Internet memes I generated last night from the Make a Meme site, just for my own amusement, and possibly for yours as well.

 

 










 

 
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