Myth Rants and Other Stuff

What’s a meme, anyway?

If you’ve seen the WOW commercial with Chuck Norris, or heard any of the “Chuck Norris Facts,” then you’ve been hit with a meme!

Memes are cultural symbols or ideas that can spread much like viruses. They’re inside urban legends, creepy pasta stories and info-bits that spread around the net.

Richard Dawkins is credited with making the Theory of Memes more well known, particularly since around 1976 when Dawkins’ book, The Selfish Gene, was published. In this book, Dawkins suggests that memes are an abstract form that is similar to the biological/physical gene. In this, a meme has agency and can affect things in the environment, just one among many things about memes makes them interesting!

Article: From an Urban Legends blog, “What is a meme?”

I think memes are cool and they’re interesting little tidbits to try to identify. They create patterns (they ARE patterns), so they’re sometimes hard to pick out but if you’re looking and listening, you can often find memes (cultural ideas and symbols) inside the stories you listen to.

Mostly online, we’re presented with funny memes in the form of jokes. Things that we send around on the internet by Facebook, in emails - to our friends, family, and acquaintances.

Being “Rick-Rolled” is a form of meme. So are Lolcats, the O RLY owl, and all the “Epic Fail” photos and captions you see online so often.

Rick Astley, Never Gonna Give You Up:

:)

Just in case you weren’t already rick roll’d today!