The term has become particularly associated with internet culture.
Internet memes are usually humorous images, videos, pieces of text, or other media that are copied, often with slight variations, and spread rapidly by internet users.
They often reference current events, pop culture, or shared experiences.
Common characteristics of internet memes include:
They spread quickly across social media platforms.
They are often funny, satirical, or absurd.
They can be easily edited, remixed, or repurposed.
They often comment on or reflect current trends or events.
Memes have become a significant part of modern communication and culture, used for humor, social commentary, marketing, and more.
A meme is a cultural analogue to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.
A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.
A meme acts as a unit that carries cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other copyable phenomena.
A meme is a cultural analogue to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.
In popular language, a meme may refer to an Internet meme, typically an image, that is remixed, copied, and circulated in a shared cultural experience online.
It is suggested that memes are a viral phenomenon that may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution.
Memes undergo variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance, each of which influences a meme’s reproductive success.
Memes manifest and spread through the behavior that they generate in their hosts.
Memes may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and mutate.
Memes that replicate most effectively are more successful.
Some memes may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.
Memes generally replicate through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient copiers of information and behavior.
People do not always copy memes perfectly, and because they may refine, combine or otherwise modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time.
The process by which memes survive and change through the evolution of culture is similar to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution.
Meme transmission requires a physical medium, such as photons, sound waves, touch, taste, or smell because memes can be transmitted only through the senses.
Memes, analogously to genes, vary in their aptitude to replicate.
Successful memes remain and spread, whereas unfit ones stall and are forgotten.
Effective means replicate and survive and are selected in the meme pool.
The longer a meme persists in its hosts, the higher its chances are of its propagation.
Imitation often involves the copying of an observed behavior of another individual.
Some liken the transmission of memes to the spread of contagions.
Social contagions such as fads, hysteria, copycat crime, and copycat suicide exemplify memes seen as the contagious imitation of ideas.
Memes increase in efficiency of parenthood in that an idea that increases the proportion of children who will adopt ideas of their parents.
Ideas that encourage the influence of a meme, as seen in many religious or political movements.
Ideas can replicate memes horizontally through a given generation, spreading more rapidly than parent-to-child meme-transmissions do.
Memes spread in cognitive transmission do not count as self-replicating.
Motivational: ideas that people adopt because they perceive some self-interest in adopting them.
The meme as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing “a piece of thought copied from person to person”, regardless of whether that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme.
A meme could consist of a single word, or a meme could consist of the entire speech in which that word first occurred. This forms an analogy to the idea of a gene as a single unit of self-replicating information found on the self-replicating chromosome.
A meme has no given size.
Memetics is the science that studies memes and their evolution and culture spread.
It attempts to apply conventional scientific methods, as in population genetics and epidemiology to explain existing patterns and transmission of cultural ideas.
Opinions differ as to how best to apply the concept of memes within a “proper” disciplinary framework.
An Internet meme is a concept that spreads rapidly from person to person via the Internet.
Memes can spread from person to person via social networks, blogs, direct email, or news sources.
Internet memes are an example of Dawkins’ meme theory at work in the sense of how they so rapidly mirror current cultural events and become a part of how the time period is defined.