The end of this slide share sent a chill down my spine:
"The idea of memes is itself a meme. You are now infected."
I overheard a conversation the other day. To be honest it was not really a conversation, it was a podcast, but the meme of podcasts seem pass for conversation these days. The podcast conversants were all political journalists and bloggers, and they were discussing words that are increasingly overused.
They agreed to never use these words again. The first they agreed upon was "meme." The second was "ping me".
I enjoy Richard Dawkins' books; full of fertile ideas:
"When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes. We were built as gene machines, created to pass on our genes. But that aspect of us will be forgotten in three generations. Your child, even your grandchild, may bear a resemblance to you [but] as each generation passes, the contribution of your genes is halved. It does not take long to reach negligible proportions… We should not seek immortality in reproduction.
But if you contribute to the world's culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a sparking plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool."- Richard Dawkins, ``The Selfish Gene''
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