(For example, if the main meme is Christianity, the bait meme might be an eternal afterlife.) Many main memes also come with a hook meme that, after the host has taken the bait meme, causes the host to replicate the main meme. More specifically, a bait meme offers some benefit to the host if it adopts the main meme. Memes that evolve alongside a larger meme are called comemes or, since the two memes have a kind of symbiotic relationship, symmemes. A similar idea is the forced meme, which is someone's deliberate (and usually unsuccessful) attempt to create a meme. If some big-time marketer fakes a grassroots meme, then you have an astroturf meme. When a prior infection by one meme prevents a host from being affected by another, the original meme is called an immuno-meme.Ī grassroots meme begins with, and is for the most part propagated by, ordinary users rather than, say, a corporation. If the meme causes self-destructive behavior in the host-as, for example, a meme about martyrdom might-the host is called a memoid, by analogy with android. A host that reacts negatively-for example, by advocating censorship of the meme-has a meme allergy. An active meme affects the behavior of its host, as opposed to an inactive or latent meme.

A readily contagious meme is said to have sneezability. Similarly, the medium that carries a meme is called a vector, the successful insertion of a meme into a person's brain is called an infection, and the infected person is a host. Thus, synonyms include ideavirus, virus of the mind, and thought contagion. (I'm indebted to memeticist Tim Tyler and the good folks at the website Know Your Meme for many of these terms.)Īlthough Dawkins's analogue for the meme was the gene, current meme lingo is heavily weighted toward epidemiology. (Indeed, the philosopher Daniel Dennett has described the meme as 'an information-packet with attitude.') For our purposes here, the meme meme has spawned a rather impressive lexicon of terms, many of which come from the field of memetics, the study of memes. The meme idea was so powerful that it quickly became a meme itself as it spread from mind to mind with the peculiar inevitability that seems to characterize all memes.

It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.Īt the end of his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, geneticist Richard Dawkins proposed the idea of the meme, which he described as 'a unit of cultural transmission' analogous to the gene. A new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet.

The selfish gene book