What are memes?

he Oxford English Dictionary succumbed in 2003 to officially including “meme” (rhyming with “dream”) as a word. The definition is, “An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation”. A paradigm for understanding the internet, media, politics and more? You betcha. Urban Dictionary spells this out further. A meme is “an idea, belief or belief system, or pattern of behavior that spreads throughout a culture either vertically by cultural inheritance (as by parents to children) or horizontally by cultural acquisition (as by peers, information media, and entertainment media)”. UD then goes on to give four more definitions: “a pervasive thought pattern that replicates”, “the fundamental unit of information”, “an idea that spreads from blog to blog” and “an internet information generator, especially of random or contentless information”. In today’s world of viral You Tube videos, chain letters and instantly recognizable spam themes like the Nigerian inheritance, these latter definitions of meme are easily understood.