Meme

Have you ever caught yourself repeating a friend's favorite exclamation without realizing it? A catchy jingle or a trending dance move works the same way. Once you've picked it up, it just comes out on its own.

In a book published in 1976, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins noticed this kind of cultural spread. Living things pass their parents' physical information to their children through genes. Human culture, he said, also gets copied from one brain to another through imitation. He took the Greek word for imitation and shaped it to sound like "gene," and called the result a "meme."

Blowing out candles on a birthday cake works this way too. So does eating tteokguk (a Korean rice-cake soup) on Lunar New Year, or bowing to greet an elder. Nobody sits through formal lessons. You watch the people around you and pick it up. These are cultural genes that survive because people imitate them, and that is exactly what memes are.

Culture that spreads by imitation has been part of human society since ancient times. Still, many scholars criticize the theory that treats memes as units copied as precisely as genes. So the meme is mostly used as a metaphor, one handy frame for thinking about how culture spreads.

In the past, memes spread only by word of mouth, books, or TV. That took a long time. Crossing regional and national borders was especially hard.

Then the internet and social media became part of daily life, and everything changed. A short video or a clever line made on the other side of the planet can now reach many people's phone screens in less than a day.

Typical examples include a screenshot from a famous movie with a silly caption added, or a challenge where people copy a short dance to a song. Users don't just watch the original. They add their own words or twist to fit their own situation and make something new.

Digital tools let anyone easily edit and parody the original, and that gave memes explosive life. This kind of voluntary participation, with its fun remixes and variations, is the digital meme's strongest weapon.

Not every parody or new phrase posted online catches on. Living things die out when they can't adapt to a harsh environment. In the same way, a meme that fails to interest people is forgotten almost instantly.

Easy-to-say words, humor that makes you burst out laughing the moment you see it, and ideas that strike a deep chord get copied by more people and stay alive. Memes that are too complicated to imitate, or that don't fit the times, lose the competition and disappear.

In the end, the slang and trends we use so naturally on social media and in everyday talk are survivors that people picked out of a lot of competition. People's attention and sympathy are the food memes live on.

So a meme is more than a harmless joke. It's a mirror that shows, vividly, the feelings and collective mood of the people living in that era.