What is a meme based on?

So, put simply, a meme is to an idea what a gene is to a physical trait. And much like how genes and physical traits evolve through natural selection, Dawkins believed that anything capable of undergoing evolution—like memes and ideas—also did so through natural selection.

What was the first Internet meme?

He couldn’t know it at the time, but that term would later be used to describe an infinite number of permutations of different phrases, images, sounds, and videos, all spread via the internet in an effort to share ideas and thoughts quickly and succinctly. Most would consider the first internet meme to be the dancing baby.

What is a meme on Instagram?

The popular meme creator Saint Hoax, who has three million Instagram followers, defines a meme as a piece of media that is repurposed to deliver a cultural, social or political expression, mainly through humor. “It has the ability to capture insight in a way that is in complete alignment with the zeitgeist,” Saint Hoax said.

What is a “meme” in linguistics?

In Mr. Dawkins’s original conception, a “meme” was analogous to a “phoneme,” the smallest unit of sound in speech, or a “morpheme,” the smallest meaningful subunit of a word, Kirby Conrod, a professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, said.