A brief history of memes | BBC Ideas

I remember first hearing the phrase internet meme and then being a little upset because people clearly thought that an internet meme was the only type of meme that exists. We think that culture is ears, you know eras or times within art and, therefore, talk about it. the discrete units that exist that surround us all the time and how they evolve, that was super super interesting. You know, the whole time I was thinking God, these brands are going to tear me down for what I'm doing, but they're So get in on the joke and you have to be and that's what you can't see like you're going, you know, No, I don't want to be part of this, this is the world we live in, this is it, this is what's happening. around us you send a lot of

memes

, yes, constantly, instead of communicating, that's how I communicate, yes, and you can, they can also say much more than one sentence, in some situations, that's true, yes, the meme is written in Here is a written joke that is related to something that happens in real life.

I think it also ties into this ironic attitude towards everything where you can just express your you know, disdain, disappointment, lack of confidence in something, that's why we call it a universal language. it brings you into this part of the internet collective so that you feel like you're getting caught up in a certain community or maybe you're getting a certain community. I read Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene in college and I was really inspired by the idea that you could have these units of culture called

memes

that would spread from person to person, so talking about religion being the ultimate meme, how you can have religion or the idea of ​​god is such a contagious concept that you can't stop thinking about it once you've heard it, but then as it passes from person to person it evolves to understand memes.

It is necessary to understand the concept of a replicator, which is information that is copied with variation and selection, so genes are a replicator when animals mate or seeds grow, etc. They have information that is copied with variations and great selection pressure, so most of them die. This is what Darwin saw in the origin of species in 1859. The same applies to memes, all the information we post all day long, and all the books we read. and the radio and television programs we watch, etc., compete for our attention, most of them we forget, most of them no one bothers to watch them and the very few that are successful and involve millions of people are the ones that we all see.

All around us in the world, the same process is happening in biology with a different mechanism, first of all, like it got a little bit of attention and it stayed there for a moment and things and I was thinking, oh, maybe they're not So. funny and then there was a fashion show in Paris, the Dior show and at that time Celine Dion was super excited, so I was in Paris and everyone was going crazy over her and I saw this picture with this Dr. bag, like this that I put the Celine logo on top and faked it as if it were in published gold.

I went to bed, woke up in the morning to a whole rant of messages on my phone and Dior had reposted it and it completely started when I think about memes, I consider them synonymous with the idea of ​​creating fragments of culture and I think that the best advertising, the best design and the best thinkers behind the best advertising, the best design, have always gone out to create fragments of culture and that is mometic. the fact that you gave people this structure to find themselves they might not have called it memetic or memes, it's really important to understand what it means to say that genes are selfish, all replicators are selfish or memes are selfish, what it means is that they will copy themselves however and whenever possible, if given the opportunity, so when we think about the world of memes, internet memes or any other type of memes, we think that we are developing them, designing and creating them for our own purposes, where otherwise.

The way to look at it is that they are using us to get ahead in the competition and that way of looking at it shows how close biology is and how our role is not to be in charge and to do it for our own good it's all really happening for the good of the memes themselves.