Memes in Digital Culture (MIT Press Essential Knowledge)
According to Dawkins’s analysis in The Selfish Gene, memes that spread successfully incorporate three basic properties—longevity, fecundity, and copy fidelity. All three are enhanced by the Internet. Online meme transmission has higher copy fidelity (that is, accuracy) than communication through other media, since digitization allows lossless
... See moreLimor Shifman • Memes in Digital Culture (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
Rather than advancing financial or technical solutions, meme coins operate primarily through the hyper-visual and social logics of internet culture. They inherit the self-referentiality and sarcasm characteristic of memes more broadly, understood here by Limor Shifman’s definition as “units of popular culture that are circulated, imitated, and... See more
Eileen Isagon Skyers • Eileen Isagon Skyers: From Speculation to Symbolic Release
Treating memes as cultural building blocks,
Limor Shifman • Memes in Digital Culture (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
The term “meme” was introduced by the biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. As part of his larger effort to apply evolutionary theory to cultural change, Dawkins defined memes as small cultural units of transmission, analogous to genes, that spread from person to person by copying or imitation. Examples of memes in his
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