Word: memes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...cultural life is full of things that seem to propagate virus-like from one mind to another: tunes, ideas, catchphrases, fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. In 1976 I coined the word meme (rhymes with cream) for these self-replicating units of culture that have a life of their...
Since then, like any good meme, it has infected the culture. To quantify this "metamemetic" statement, I did a quick search of the World Wide Web. The adjectival form "memetic" clocked up 5,042 mentions. To put this into perspective, I compared a few other recently coined words or fashionable expressions. Spin doctor (or spin-doctor) got 1,412 mentions, dumbing down 3,905, docudrama (or docu-drama) 2,848, sociobiology 6,679, zippergate 1,752, studmuffin 776, post-structural (or poststructural...
Further searching of the Internet reveals a newsgroup, alt.memetics, which has received about 12,000 postings during the past year. There are online articles titled, to name a couple, "Memes, Metamemes and Politics" and "Memes, and Grinning Idiot Press." There are separate websites on "Meme Theorists on the Web" and the "Meme Gardening Page." There is even a new religion (tongue in cheek, I hope) called the "Church of Virus," complete with its own list of Sins and Virtues and its own patron saint (St. Charles Darwin). I was alarmed to discover a passing reference to "St. Dawkin...
...infected my friends with the skill, and it then spread around the school with the speed of measles and pretty much the same epidemiological time course. I don't know whether the epidemic subsequently jumped to other schools (a boarding school is a somewhat isolated backwater of the meme pool). But I do know that my father originally picked up the Chinese-junk meme during an almost identical epidemic at the same school 25 years earlier. The earlier virus was launched by the school matron. Long after the old matron's departure, I had reintroduced her meme...
...Foucaultian paradigm wherein all actions, even involuntary motions or "fakes" or failures (quarterback sacked), coalesce in meaning, and everything that the game organizes in the way of objects, rites, customs (the superstitious butt slapping, the narcissistically erotic Bob Fosse touchdown dances) constitutes a coherent whole--the game lui-meme. Foucault saw pro football as the quintessential mutation of the Classical quadrilateral of language into the Modern anthropological quadrilateral. Actually, he didn't. But it amuses me to think he might have. Ha ha, Boomer Esiason...