Meme
A reader's summary of a word that began as a thought experiment in evolutionary biology and now mostly means a captioned picture.
The term at a glance
In everyday online use, a meme is a joke, image, phrase or format that spreads quickly and is repeatedly altered by the people who pass it on. In its original sense, it is broader: any idea, habit or style that propagates through imitation. The two meanings overlap but are not identical, and much of the argument about memes comes from sliding between them.
Origin
The word was coined by the biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976). He shortened the Greek mimeme, “that which is imitated”, to make a monosyllable that rhymed with “gene”. His examples were tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions and the ways of making pots or of building arches. The chapter was a speculative coda to a book about genes, not a research program, but it handed later writers a compact vocabulary for cultural transmission.
History and context
Through the 1990s the idea drew attention from philosophers and psychologists, among them Daniel Dennett and Susan Blackmore, whose book The Meme Machine (1999) argued that imitation is what makes humans distinctive. Critics, including anthropologists such as Dan Sperber, objected that culture is rebuilt through inference rather than copied intact, so the gene analogy misleads. Meanwhile the word escaped academia. Early internet communities used it for circulating jokes, from the dancing baby animation of the 1990s to the lolcats and rage comics of the 2000s, and by the 2010s it meant mostly an image with text. Shifman's book gave the field a more careful definition. The same circulation drives copypasta, shitposting and brain rot, and in 2016 the term “meme war” entered political reporting.
Main ideas
A replicator made of culture
Dawkins proposed the meme at the end of The Selfish Gene as a cultural counterpart to the gene: a tune, a catchphrase, a fashion or a way of making pots that spreads by being copied from one mind to another. His point was modest. Evolution by selection needs only copying, variation and differential survival, and nothing says those must be biological.
Imitation, remix and the shared joke
In Memes in Digital Culture (2014), Limor Shifman defines internet memes as groups of digital items that share content, form or stance, are created with awareness of each other, and are circulated, imitated and transformed by many users. The emphasis on awareness and transformation separates a meme from a piece of content that merely goes viral unchanged.
Templates lower the cost of participating
An image macro supplies the picture and the grammar, and the contributor supplies one new line. That small step makes participation cheap, which is why a format can pass through thousands of hands within days. It is the same economics as the copypasta, with a visual frame and a lighter touch.
Fitness is not quality
A meme survives by being easy to copy and fun to send, not by being true or good. Brevity, surprise, an in-group wink and emotional charge all help. This is why jokes, rumors and slogans travel in the same channels, and why the same machinery can carry a harmless cat picture or a politically loaded falsehood.
Communities as the selection environment
What counts as funny depends on who is looking. Forums and imageboards were early incubators, and a format often matured in one community before leaking into the mainstream, where it was frequently declared dead. Brands and politicians who adopt a format late tend to be mocked for it, which is itself a recurring pattern.
Critique
- Culture is not copied like DNA. Genes are discrete and copied with high fidelity. Jokes and ideas are reshaped each time they pass through a person, so there is no stable unit to count. Cognitive anthropologists argue this undermines the analogy.
- Internet memes are chosen, not blindly copied. Dawkins's replicators spread without intent. People forward a meme on purpose, to signal taste or belonging, so it is closer to deliberate authorship than to mindless selection.
- The word invites easy explanations. Calling an idea a “mind virus” can stand in for explaining why people believe it, and it flatters the speaker by implying that only other people are infected.
Impact
Whatever its scientific standing, the word gave people a handle on how attention moves across platforms, and memes are now a mainstream language for humor, protest, advertising and campaigning. They shape how a story is framed before facts are checked, which connects them to wider worries about repetition making a claim feel true. They also left a mark on how researchers study culture: a format's spread can be traced, dated and compared in a way that older fashions could not.