Derek's post of yesterday asks to show a "meme", a picture on the 6th page of my flickr photostream, on this blog. Here is mine. I have no idea what the name means, or why it's called that. The closest word I can think of is the French word for "same" - même. So, perhaps it means something like "copied", but why the 6th picture on the 6th page?
This picture was taken during the "Symphonie of Fire" from the apartment balcony of our close, and longtime friend (she's part of the family) in West Vancouver, looking over English Bay, towards the False Creek area.
Richard Dawkins, the biologist, invented the word "meme" as an analog to "gene" in his 1976 book "The Selfish Gene," but instead of information propagated genetically, a meme propagates from person to person culturally.
ReplyDeleteWikipedia: "The term is derived from the Greek word mimema for mimic. Memes are cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate and are subject to selective pressures."
The field of study, logically enough, is called memetics.