An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a... — Richard Dawkins

An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version.

Author: Richard Dawkins

Insight: When Dawkins first used the word "meme" back in 1976, he imagined ideas spreading like genes—mostly faithful copies, small mutations, survival of the fittest. But he didn't anticipate the internet would flip that script entirely. Online, we don't preserve ideas carefully. We remix them on purpose. A single photo becomes thousands of variations in days. A phrase gets twisted into something the original author never intended. That's not failure—that's the whole point. This actually reveals something useful about how we think and communicate now. We're not trying to pass down pure information anymore; we're playing with it. Memes succeed because they're deliberately malleable, because they invite participation. Your contribution to a meme—your twist, your remix, your joke variation—is what makes it worth sharing rather than just copying. It's creative mutation masquerading as copying, which is maybe why memes feel so alive compared to traditional media. The surprising part? This makes internet memes less like evolution and more like art. That loss of accuracy Dawkins noticed isn't a bug—it's the feature that makes the whole system work. We want our ideas distorted, contextualized, and made personal. We're not genes anymore; we're collaborators.

Source: The Selfish Gene, 309, 2006