Getting to Know You, Part I - Getting Started with Programming. Meme. A meme (/ˈmiːm/ meem)[1] is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. "[2] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.[3] The word meme is a shortening (modeled on gene) of mimeme (from Ancient Greek μίμημα Greek pronunciation: [míːmɛːma] mīmēma, "imitated thing", from μιμεῖσθαι mimeisthai, "to imitate", from μῖμος mimos "mime")[4] and it was coined by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976)[1][5] as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena.
Dawkins' own position is somewhat ambiguous: he obviously welcomed N. K. History[edit] Memetics. This article is related to the study of self-replicating units of culture, not to be confused with Mimesis. Memetics is a theory of mental content based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution, originating from the popularization of Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene.[1] Proponents describe memetics as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer.
The meme, analogous to a gene, was conceived as a "unit of culture" (an idea, belief, pattern of behaviour, etc.) which is "hosted" in the minds of one or more individuals, and which can reproduce itself, thereby jumping from mind to mind. Thus what would otherwise be regarded as one individual influencing another to adopt a belief is seen as an idea-replicator reproducing itself in a new host. As with genetics, particularly under a Dawkinsian interpretation, a meme's success may be due to its contribution to the effectiveness of its host. History[edit] The modern memetics movement dates from the mid-1980s. Internet and memetics. Garry Marshall School of Computing Science, Middlesex University, Trent Park, Bramley Road, London N14 4XS, England. e-mail: Garry2@mdx.ac.uk Abstract The functioning and usage of the Internet are examined in terms of memes and memetics.
It is shown that memetic systems can be distinguished at various levels of Internet operation, and that these systems become increasingly simple as they move further from the user level. In this way, memetics provides a unified framework for examining the overall behaviour of the Internet and its users. 1. Memetics provides a powerful new way to think about things such as, for example, creativity (Gabora, 1997). The Internet, like all computer networks, is designed and constructed in a layered fashion, with layers of software added to the basic hardware. In fact, as this paper shows in a limited way, the functioning of the various layers can be interpreted memetically. 2. We begin by considering the World Wide Web. 3. 4. 5. 6. Gabora, L. Marshall, G.