Construct · 3 fields · 4 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one word, three constructs Nearest construct by meaningmimesiscompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to meme is mimesis.
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Richard Dawkins coined the word in 1976 in The Selfish Gene, naming a meme as a unit of cultural transmission, a tune, idea, phrase, or practice that copies itself from one mind to another by imitation, much as a gene copies through bodies. Susan Blackmore's 1999 The Meme Machine developed the idea into a fuller account of imitation as a second replicator shaping human culture. The referent here is a theoretical replicating unit of culture studied through evolution and imitation, not a genre of online content or a class of traded shares.[1][2]
Limor Shifman's 2013 article Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling with a Conceptual Troublemaker reworked the term for online culture, defining an internet meme as a group of digital items that share common form or content, are created with awareness of each other, and are circulated, imitated, and transformed by many users. Her book-length treatment Memes in Digital Culture set out this account in full. The referent is an observable genre of user made digital artifacts and their spread, a narrower and more empirical thing than the broad cultural replicator of evolutionary theory, and unrelated to a stock's price behaviour.[3]
Lyócsa, Baumöhl, and Výrost's 2022 study YOLO trading: Riding with the herd during the GameStop episode analysed the meme stock, an equity whose sharp short-run price moves are driven by coordinated retail attention and social-media discussion rather than by changes in the underlying business. The label came out of the 2021 episodes in which crowds of small investors, organising on social platforms, bid up companies such as GameStop. The referent is a market phenomenon measured in prices, volume, and online chatter, and it has nothing in common with a cultural replicator or a genre of online content beyond the shared word.[4]
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