Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist. I mean he is British and he studies biology across the world. He has written several books and is a well-known name. He is also quite an outspoken Atheist who has said a lot about how religion has ruined the world for bad. He was also featured in one of the South Park’s most-mind-maddening episode “Go God Go” (not available legally to be viewed anymore, probably). But he is also known to be the inventor of the important word in this world at the moment:
Meme
An idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture
Curiosity might kill the cat but I read the book ‘The Selfish Gene’ just for the reason that I wanted to know how come gene and meme are related. After some interesting pages of ‘wow’, ‘oh seriously?’, ‘Amazing’ as it had facts about how amazing our world is and how everything evolved, I realized that it was not really meant for me. Still, it is a great book for those who are interested in evolutionary biology and how our genes define our biology, our behavior, our culture, and how the genes are ‘selfish’. It is like the book Sapiens, but for the animal kingdom. I am not learned enough or interested to review the book critically as I skimmed through most of it, so I won’t do that.
Memes are what I wanted to write about. You get them daily and in dozens. You still call it ‘may-may’ or ‘mee-mee’ but it is ‘meem’. With the advent of smartphones, as soon as one event occurs, there are more memes created for that than all the previous memes of everything else put together. The generation of memes sometimes happens so fast that memes are ready before the event actually happens. Sometimes, you will receive them in bulk on Whatsapp and you would have absolutely no idea what it is. The person who would have sent you might be choking by chuckling but for you, it would be like the song everyone likes but you don’t.
We live in a world which is a meme generating factory. I still have no idea absolutely what Binod was but I am happy that their shelf-life is also very minute. They live and die so fast that even if you miss them, you won’t really miss them. For some, they get so consumed by them that they will assume that everyone knows about them. Some people live by them, and they even critique them, some take them too literally and some want to just have fun. And forget about Intellectual Property Rights.
But our culture gives people enough opportunities make memes, share memes and become memes.
Lately, I have talked a lot about FOMO. But I just wanted to make sure nobody misses it out.
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