An Xiao Mina > Quotes

“The word “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins in his seminal 1978 work The Selfish Gene. The basic idea is that human cultural practices—tying one’s hair in a pony-tail versus tying it in intricate braids, wearing watches versus wearing extensive bangles, or holding racist views—spread like biological genes. Some memes take hold of the public’s mind, proliferate quickly, and along the way morph and shift to the sender’s viewpoints. The word “meme” picked up steam later in the 1970s, as Dawkins’s work sparked an entire field, called memetics, to study these phenomena.”
― An Xiao Mina, Memes to Movements: How the World's Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power