Memes in Digital Culture (MIT Press Essential Knowledge)

issue of human agency in the process of meme diffusion.

it may be useful to turn Dawkins’s definition on its head by looking at memes not as single ideas or formulas that propagate well, but as groups of content items.

may lack analytical power, as it assembles very different elements under its large conceptual tent.

Curiously enough, the vast majority of the sampled videos employ common ironic keying: these videos are more similar to each other than to Crocker’s original.

Susan Blackmore’s

the one that viewers imitated with a high level of accuracy is the video’s form.

reducing culture to biology narrows and simplifies complex human behaviors.

dissemination of memes, she submits, is based on intentional agents with decision-making powers:

poetic,