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> I don’t think they qualify as memes to be honest. For a lot of people “meme” is synonymous with just “funny picture” it seems, but a real meme is something mo

> I don’t think they qualify as memes to be honest. For a lot of people “meme” is synonymous with just “funny picture” it seems, but a real meme is something more than just a funny picture. Agreed. > it needs to be adopted and adapted by I don't think you get to target your pedantism quite so tightly. A meme before about 2005 was "an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture" (m-w.com). The "image macro" meaning (meme-ing?) with adaptation is a very recent interpretation (lolcats and icanhazcheezburger?), and as you said above, "a lot of people" don't necessarily even think of "meme" that way.

jacobolus 8y ago
A “meme” before 2005 was a made-up word that only Richard Dawkins and a few other people ever used (a way of extending his discussion of self-replication in evolutionary biology to cultural phenomena), and many other people thought was a rather pointless synonym for “idea” or “concept” built on a flimsy analogy. Then people on the web decided they needed a word for “popular funny picture with lots of remixes”, and adopted that word (maybe as a joke?).
- cicero 8y ago
  I discovered the word "meme" on Usenet discussion groups back in 1992. It was a well-known idea in the Hacker News of that day, and was being applied to things that were being passed around on the Internet. However, since this was before the web had caught on, the memes were all textual. I was not surprised then when I saw the term used in its present, graphical meaning.
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    The Selfish Gene came out in the mid 1970s and was a big bestseller (probably in the millions of copies sold by now). Sure, a few other people adopted the term, but it was not in wide use. I would guess most of the people who talked about “memes” in the 90s had directly read Dawkins’s book.
    - kbutler 8y ago
      I discussed memes in the 90s, but have never read Dawkin's book. I probably got it from study of artificial intelligence/machine learning/evolutionary algorithms - I had no indication most of the others in my discussions had read The Selfish Gene either.

jacobolus 8y ago

A “meme” before 2005 was a made-up word that only Richard Dawkins and a few other people ever used (a way of extending his discussion of self-replication in evolutionary biology to cultural phenomena), and many other people thought was a rather pointless synonym for “idea” or “concept” built on a flimsy analogy. Then people on the web decided they needed a word for “popular funny picture with lots of remixes”, and adopted that word (maybe as a joke?).

cicero 8y ago
I discovered the word "meme" on Usenet discussion groups back in 1992. It was a well-known idea in the Hacker News of that day, and was being applied to things that were being passed around on the Internet. However, since this was before the web had caught on, the memes were all textual. I was not surprised then when I saw the term used in its present, graphical meaning.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  The Selfish Gene came out in the mid 1970s and was a big bestseller (probably in the millions of copies sold by now). Sure, a few other people adopted the term, but it was not in wide use. I would guess most of the people who talked about “memes” in the 90s had directly read Dawkins’s book.
  - kbutler 8y ago
    I discussed memes in the 90s, but have never read Dawkin's book. I probably got it from study of artificial intelligence/machine learning/evolutionary algorithms - I had no indication most of the others in my discussions had read The Selfish Gene either.