{"id":11161,"date":"2020-12-16T16:29:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-16T23:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=11161"},"modified":"2020-12-25T16:32:32","modified_gmt":"2020-12-25T23:32:32","slug":"the-selfish-meme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2020\/12\/16\/the-selfish-meme\/","title":{"rendered":"The Selfish Meme"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/guide-memes\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">from WIRED<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The WIRED Guide to Memes<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p>Everything you ever wanted to know about Nyan Cat, Doge, and the art of the Rickroll.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/author\/angela-watercutter\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ANGELA WATERCUTTER<\/a> &amp;\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/author\/emma-grey-ellis\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">EMMA GREY ELLIS<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/media.wired.com\/photos\/5a726e8b8d395a4a142281a5\/master\/w_1600%2Cc_limit\/howwegotthere.jpg\" alt=\"What Is A Meme The Definitive WIRED Guide\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>MEMES AND THE&nbsp;internet\u2014they&#8217;re made for each other. Not because they\u2019re digital visual communication (though of course, they are that), but because they are the product of a hive mind. They are the shorthand of a hyper-connected group thinking in unison. And, friends, the web hive mind is a weird (often funny, sometimes dangerous) place.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The term \u201cmeme\u201d comes from evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. For Dawkins, cultural ideas were no different than genes\u2014concepts that had to&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/arts-culture\/what-defines-a-meme-1904778\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">spread themselves from brain to brain<\/a>&nbsp;as quickly as they could, replicating and mutating as they went. He called those artifacts memes, bits of cultural DNA that encoded society\u2019s shared experiences while also constantly evolving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But Dawkins coined the term in 1976,\u00a0<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=WkHO9HI7koEC&amp;lpg=PA194&amp;vq=meme&amp;pg=PA192#v=snippet&amp;q=meme&amp;f=false\" target=\"_blank\">in his book\u00a0<em>The Selfish Gene<\/em><\/a>, long before the modern internet, before\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/tag\/memes\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">memes<\/a>\u00a0morphed into what they are now. Back then, Dawkins was talking about passing along culture\u2014song melodies, art styles, whatever. Today, denizens of the internet think of memes as jokes passed across social media in the form of image macros (those pictures of babies or cats or whatever with bold black-and-white words on them), hashtags (the thing you amended to what you just wrote on Twitter), GIFs (usually of a celebrity, reality star, or drag queen reacting to what you just wrote on Twitter), or videos (that\u00a0<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ\" target=\"_blank\">Rick Astley video<\/a>\u00a0people used to send you).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>[ <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/guide-memes\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">click to continue reading at WIRED<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from WIRED The WIRED Guide to Memes Everything you ever wanted to know about Nyan Cat, Doge, and the art of the Rickroll. by ANGELA WATERCUTTER &amp;\u00a0EMMA GREY ELLIS MEMES AND THE&nbsp;internet\u2014they&#8217;re made for each other. Not because they\u2019re digital visual communication (though of course, they are that), but because they are the product of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art","category-mirth","category-weirdness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11161\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}