There’s a problem with taking a one sentence definition out of context and then citing like that. You’re reading that definition here as though it were “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that can be spread from person to person within a culture”.
Whereas to me it’s clear that sharing a thing online at least once doesn’t make it a meme. If it did, the word loses any useful meaning and may as well be “thing”. Meme used to mean that the image or idea was so popular it gained a symbolic meaning that an entire culture could recall in a glance. Not just that it was a thing they saw on the Internet once.
For more about the full context, pick up The Selfish Gene, in which Richard Dawkins coins the term and explains it as a “gene” of information. Genes are genes whether or not they get passed on.
Why do people argue against community names (and words in general) having meaning?
They’re just using the original definition of meme - “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture”
How is this not an idea?
There’s a problem with taking a one sentence definition out of context and then citing like that. You’re reading that definition here as though it were “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that can be spread from person to person within a culture”.
Whereas to me it’s clear that sharing a thing online at least once doesn’t make it a meme. If it did, the word loses any useful meaning and may as well be “thing”. Meme used to mean that the image or idea was so popular it gained a symbolic meaning that an entire culture could recall in a glance. Not just that it was a thing they saw on the Internet once.
For more about the full context, pick up The Selfish Gene, in which Richard Dawkins coins the term and explains it as a “gene” of information. Genes are genes whether or not they get passed on.
Look up the origins of the term. The word “meme” has always had this problem, because it was poorly defined in the first place.