Back then, Dawkins was talking about passing along culture-song melodies, art styles, whatever. He called those artifacts memes, bits of cultural DNA that encoded society’s shared experiences while also constantly evolving.īut Dawkins coined the term in 1976, in his book The Selfish Gene, long before the modern internet, before memes morphed into what they are now. For Dawkins, cultural ideas were no different than genes-concepts that had to spread themselves from brain to brain as quickly as they could, replicating and mutating as they went. The term “meme” comes from evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.
And, friends, the web hive mind is a weird (often funny, sometimes dangerous) place. They are the shorthand of a hyper-connected group thinking in unison. Not because they’re digital visual communication (though of course, they are that), but because they are the product of a hive mind. Memes and the internet-they're made for each other.
