Memes are past their prime.
Richard Dawkins first coined the term
meme towards the end of his 1976 book
The Selfish Gene initially as an instructive analogy and
a way of illustrating the concept of replicators. Memes were just like genes but they replicated themselves through minds and culture rather than cells and bodies. Of course, the meme, like any good self-replicating idea, caught on and spread like wildfire and has been used to illuminate studies into subjects as diverse as the memetics of
music and the memetics of
suicide. There is an alternate view however that sees the
grand project of memetics as completely misguided.
posted by lagado
on Jun 12, 2001 -
13 comments
I was reading this article about the
new breed of modern airships when I stumbled over the line "Not your grandfather's airship". That started me off thinking about the "Not your father's X"
meme that's been part of the journalistic background noise for a while now. It seems to me to evoking something oedipal, a male child's revulsion of his father and his father's way of doing things. It's usually juxtaposed against technology or at least things that aren't all that old to begin with. Does anyone know who used it first? A
quick search of Google reveals it in everything from "
Cuba: not your father's stagnant nation" to "
XML: Not your father's HTML". Anyone got any favorites?
posted by lagado
on Jan 4, 2001 -
19 comments
