I dunno if it’s a good or bad thing, but memes have kind of died now that they’re largely used on social media advertising to sell shit.
Even more cringe is when they’re used by politicians lol. Like I kid you not republicans print out their bad memes on display boards and bring them to congress and shit. We truely live in surreal times.
lets go back to the original definition of meme,
Memory+gene,
IE, a concept that is shared and survives on its own. I can teach you to do something, which you teach someone else and so on.
those concepts can change and are affected by natural selection, is it isn’t shared it dies, if it changes (unintentionally, let’s say when you teach someone you change it a bit and that version makes it easier to teach)…
it’s a term coined be Richard Dawkins in the selfish gene(he is a bit of a twat but that idea is interesting).
unless you are referring to a very specific kind of meme (like using animal templates for online memes) memes cannot really end. language is a meme, culture is a meme.
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It was definitely a
comment, but that’s not always a bad thing. I think many people actually don’t know that was the original meaning of the word, and while it’s too late imo to try to use the word ‘meme’ that way, it is a powerful and potentially useful concept that I wish we did have a more exclusive term for. 