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complete idiot's guide to memesWhen I try to explain to people what I do for money, the word meme usually pops up in the conversation, and I've often found that an example, like Antoine Dodson, works best than trying to communicate a working definition.

In his 1976 best-seller The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins defined the word meme as a cultural unit of measurement - a thought, phrase, style or other cultural expression that can be imitated by individuals. Under this definition, all ideas and icons are memes. Religions are memes. The phrase, "An apple a day keeps the doctor away" is a meme. White supremacism is a meme. Pop culture, technology, philosophy and politics are made up of memes.

The word comes from the Greek mimema, which simply means something that can be mimicked. Imitation is the way that memes spread. These cultural artifacts are simple, original ideas that often serve to establish bonds within a group. In Dawkins's view, memes are the informational expression of evolution. Just as species develop physical traits to better adapt to their environments, so too do they develop complex networks of information that help them to communicate and ultimately survive.

Another way of looking at memes is as though they themselves are the organisms, albeit informational. The strongest ones survive and spread, like viruses. And that's why we say that strong memes have "gone viral." Memes spawn variation and evolve to spread farther.

So how do we go from this broad academic definition of memes to the current popular definition, wherein images, videos, games and stories are shared through the internet until they achieve some level of iconography? The Complete Idiot's Guide to Memes, by John Gunders and Damon Brown, does not attempt to connect the dots, though it does serve as an informative introduction in basic memetics (the study of memes). The book covers such broad cultural memes as doomsday conspiracies, suicide cults, flat earth societies and nihilism.

I tracked down a scholarly work by computer scientist Gary Marshall (via this Guardian piece on internet memes, via this Wikipedia entry) which sites an essay by research professor Francis Heylighen. The essay, written in 1996, discusses memes on the net:

The success of a web document can then be measured by the number of virtual copies or links pointing to it: the documents with most pointers will be used most extensively. There are already web robots, i.e. programs which automatically scan the Web, that make "hit parades" of the documents which are linked to most often. For example, it is likely that a reproduction of the works of Van Gogh on the Web will be much more popular in number of pointers than the work of some unknown 20th century painter.
From what I can gather, this was around the first time that thinkers began to view things on the web in terms of their popularity or virility. The accessibility and linking/hosting structure of the web provides people with a way to share stuff much faster and with vastly extended reach. The internet was made for memes. As early as 2000, journalist Karl Hodge writes:
Even the processes the net uses to route information as individual packets are analogous to the passage of memes in the real world. How people communicate over the net contributes, too, encouraging conversation that packs the most amount of meaning into the smallest amount of space. The best internet memes share the same characteristics as the best traditional memes. They can just be copied and distributed more quickly.
Around this time, Karl Hodge and other journalists began to use the word meme regularly to describe specifically web-born phenomena like The Hampster Dance or The Dancing Baby. Since then, the word has become more entrenched in the web, with sites like Know Your Meme serving to document these pop cultural artifacts spread on the internet.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Memes is indeed made for idiots. The book holds your hand every step of the way to make sure you understand everything, like a kids' textbook. It's very comprehensive though, and internet memes only comprise a small portion of the book. The end of the book gets particularly interesting when the authors' attention turns toward memetics as a theory. In the process, they relay information about recent theories and opposing systems of thought about human ideation. So if you're looking for Keyboard Cat, just keep reading Urlesque. But if you have a genuine interest in how general information is shared by humans and cock your head when you hear someone using the word "meme," it's a decent springboard.