Public Service Announcement

[learnedax]

There is some debate about what the best definition of 'meme' is, in that many latter commentators prefer more generality than Dawkins originally suggested. However, it is well established that 'meme' is not a synonym for fad, much less rumor, joke, or figure of speech. A self-contained idea (such as that of memes) can be argued to have memetic properties, but the latest Q&A does not.

And, as long as I'm bashing innocent bystanders, take a look here.

Comments

[jducoeur]

Their meaning does appear to be a subset of the older meaning of the word, however.

I concur. While the word does get abused a bit, most of the time I see it used on LJ, it falls within the definition I generally use, which is more or less "An idea which uses humans effectively as viral propagation vectors". That's certainly not the only definition, but it seems to match common usage best, and it's a useful concept as such...

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

I do not fundamentally disagree with your definition. And if you mean it as an idea of a generic sort, rather than a cultural building block such as the existence of god, I have no real quarrel with your usage. I do tire of people using it because they think it's cooler than saying "it's the latest thing", but only because I too think the word is cool, and large-scale imprecise usage dulls one to its niftiness. My post, however, was directed toward the, in my experience quite large, group of people who only know that "meme" means to them "a thing that everyone else is doing".

Drawing on the original analogy, my distinction is roughly this: just as not all chemicals that spread through the body are genetic, not all concepts that spread through the mind are mimetic.