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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
by 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 agoThe 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 agoI 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.