Here begins: my toot-serial snap shots of writing my thesis.
#amwriting #thesis
This may be a non-native English thing, but meme, is a word I did not learn until I understood the internet, and as we use memes here.
Which makes it hilarious for me to read about in the literary theory books, as it refers to the original definition:
"an element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means."
@maloki I think most native English speakers discovered the word meme through the Internet definition. Before that it was an obscure term coined by Richard Dawkins and never permeated the popular vernacular with it's intended definition. I think any lexicographer worth their salt would list the internet version as the primary definition.
@Sweet_Tango_Chill @maloki Dawkins' 'meme' was to the general public perhaps, but very much in vogue among the computer science and science fiction crowd that built out the Internet in the 1990s, and then social media in the 00s. Dawkins' 'meme' - self-replicating idea - pioneered the idea of 'viral' content, and that's why the word got repurposed to describe bite-sized visual versions of such content.
@maloki @Sweet_Tango_Chill The key idea behind a meme in the Dawkins sense is that it's an idea that, once it's out in the world, spreads on its own, you don't have to keep pushing it.
On the weirder fringes of the Internet (that later consolidated into 4chan and Reddit - where the image meme was invented) various creepy people ten years ago used to brag about their skills in 'memetic engineering'. What they now call 'shitposting' and 'fake news', and got a President elected.
@natecull @Sweet_Tango_Chill #untagme
So I can get unstuck on mastodon, :D
@Sweet_Tango_Chill @maloki So, meme itself is a meme, then? 🤔
as a second opinion, the word 'meme' definitely had a life on the internet before it came into it's common, more specific, usage. The words "memetic hazard" are littered all over old creepypasta, for example.
One is ABSOLUTELY a subset of the other though, which is why I would list the "element of culture" definition first. meme(2) is just a specific expression of meme(1) that has the most obvious viral properties of any piece of internet culture.
@maloki @Sweet_Tango_Chill I once worked with some people who did the OPPOSITE, in that they would use the word meme to mean basically *anything*, the way people often use "thing" or "stuff", and it was a pretty gr8 meme.
@Sweet_Tango_Chill It also comes from French même if I recall correctly, Even though that means "the same".
Different but the same.
I dunno, language is funny.