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Wednesday, 21 May 2003 04:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
taimatsuI've been thinking. Memes. A meme is an idea. Here's the first sentence of the definition from the Jargon File (the New HAcker's Dictionary, which you can find via Google with ease.) "An idea considered as a replicator, esp. with the connotation that memes parasitize people into propagating them much as viruses do."
A quiz about dragons, or cartoon characters, finishing with a pretty picture, is not a meme. A list of questions about when you met someone and what you most remember about their pets isn't a meme. For those, I'd prefer the term 'lemming'. Cute idea, everyone does it all at once, then it's forgotten. A real meme would be more something you have to think about.
in terms of LJ, something like someone trying to work out an English sentence that contains all of the 26 letters of the alphabet exactly once, thus leading into a comment-discussion and other people also getting interested and working on the problem - I think that's more like a meme.
If I find more good examples, I'll mention them. I just get slightly miffed when people refer to brainless tests as 'memes'.
A quiz about dragons, or cartoon characters, finishing with a pretty picture, is not a meme. A list of questions about when you met someone and what you most remember about their pets isn't a meme. For those, I'd prefer the term 'lemming'. Cute idea, everyone does it all at once, then it's forgotten. A real meme would be more something you have to think about.
in terms of LJ, something like someone trying to work out an English sentence that contains all of the 26 letters of the alphabet exactly once, thus leading into a comment-discussion and other people also getting interested and working on the problem - I think that's more like a meme.
If I find more good examples, I'll mention them. I just get slightly miffed when people refer to brainless tests as 'memes'.
