this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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Memes
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Eh, what "meme" actually means and what it currently means in popular culture are two different things. People never understood what it really means, but the most commonly used meaning of it is constantly changing.
The word itself was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976. But it wasn't a commonly used term until around 2005, even then it was used exclusively for specific things and few people knew its actual meaning. But memes in their literal sense have almost always been a thing, and they're common among many species.
Your post is an "uh, actually" version of what I said. You are not disagreeing with me but still somehow making it sound like you do.
I meant the term meme never applied to only sharing "image macros" but to inside jokes, coming shared references, common cultural knowledge. It is an absolutely fascinating term and concept if used like that, and I wish more people would understand it and use it in the same way.
What species aside from Homo Sapiens use memes?
In Dawkins' sense of the word, memes are 'units of cultural inheritance'. So melodic movements in bird song, that birds teach each other, could be considered memes. Any other place you might find cultural inheritance, you could describe it in terms of memes. Memes were simply meant to be a cultural analogy to genes.