glenn grant

Glenn Grant:
Meme (pron. meem): A contagious information pattern that
replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their
behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern. (Term coined by Dawkins,
by analogy with "gene".) Individual slogans, catch-phrases, melodies,
icons, inventions, and fashions are typical memes. An idea or information
pattern is not a meme until it causes someone to replicate it, to repeat it

"A Memetic Lexicon"
Version 3.5
Glenn Grant, Memeticist
"An idea is something
you have;
an ideology, something that has
you."
--Morris Berman

What if ideas were viruses?

I first encountered the meme about memes in Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas, a collection of his wonderful columns for Scientific American. His articles on memes got me all fired up, setting off ideas like a chain-reaction of fireworks.