In response to my post about the Burger King meme, Stephanie suggested that perhaps the Burger King king wasn’t really a meme at all. In that particular case, she asked: what’s the difference between a meme and a simple marketing gimmick?

Here is the definition of a meme according to Richard Dawkins (author of both The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion, along with many other books), the guy who actually coined the term (as paraphrased by the Journal of Memetics):

The word “meme” refers to “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation”. More precisely, a meme can be defined as an information pattern, held in an individual’s memory or in an outside artefact (e.g. book, record or tool), which is likely to be communicated or copied to another individual’s memory. Examples of memes are ideas, technologies, theories, songs, fashions, and traditions. This covers all forms of beliefs, values and behaviors that are normally taken over from others rather than discovered independently.

In this explanation, Dawkins has subjugated the words “idea” and “theory” under the word meme, making ‘meme’ a broader term that encompasses both concepts. Similarly, songs, fashions and traditions are all manifestations of units of information in a society.

While it’s hard to argue with the guy who invented the word, it would seem to me that the meme itself is not really a unit of transmission so much as a unit of information that propagates through transmission. So within the context of this site, I’ve thought of memes as pieces of information that are transmitted from one person to another (which could potentially be all information, I suppose).

There are certainly issues with use of the word meme — yet meme is certainly shorter than “unit of information”. While we often use the term to describe what could really be called trends, I would suggest that we could look at any piece of information as a meme. It’s just that not all memes are transmission-worthy.

The Journal of Memetics suggests that the examination of meme transmission “can be approached from a variety of disciplines, including sociology, economics, psychology, linguistics, biology, anthropology, complex systems, and computer science” (I might also add knowledge management to that list). So in essence, memetics is not so much a field of study as an aggregation of various disciplines’ knowledge of information transmission and knowledge sharing.

Just thought I’d clear up my use of the word meme.