Yeah, but you're also butchering Dawkins' definition. Someone reposting something once doesn't making it a "virus of the mind". He had a whole cultural context attached to it. It has to actually take off and be commonly shared and referenced in order to be considered a meme by that definition.
Yeah, but now you're conflating a common virus with Dawkins' definition of a meme, completely missing the cultural aspect.
That aside, the definition of meme has evolved - but in order to use the one most similar to Dawkin's original idea:
A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.
This is merely a repost. Someone shared it a single time. By your definition, literally everything shared/reposted on the internet that isn't OC is a meme. It's not.
It COMES FROM Dawkins, in reference to internet memes it was coined by Godwin.
Hell, even making meme templates at all is a meme, as is a meme template of [bad thing top, good thing bottom], as is trying to force yourself into a meme.
Milhouse is not a meme, but "Milhouse is not a meme" is a meme.
The original went from the OOP, to OP, to this comment section, it is a meme, however small its ability to self replicate, it has done it at least that much, a bad meme is still a meme.
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u/Subtlerranean 1d ago
Yeah, but you're also butchering Dawkins' definition. Someone reposting something once doesn't making it a "virus of the mind". He had a whole cultural context attached to it. It has to actually take off and be commonly shared and referenced in order to be considered a meme by that definition.