Meme, Metaphors and Resources Series of Articles

On this Site

Teacher Resources

get worksheets
just for K-6
from teachers at
Worksheet Library

Memes Articles>>Introduction>>Definition>>Green>>Ecocapitalist>>More

Get your memes on a t-shirt or coffee mug or dozens of other products.

Memes Articles of the Metaphor -- Resources Series

Memes: The Metaphors of Modern Culture
What is a Meme? Value of Memes in Communication and Memes at Work with Teachable Moment: Children and Toys
Living Green -- A Politically Correct Lifestyle, A Global Imperative, and a Meme for Today's Culture
Ecocapitalist and other Green Business Memes
Coming: predicting the future; infopreneur; sustainability; green architecture, and more
Other essays, many on memes;
More green essays on Valerie's Soapbox listed under the keywords sustainability and ecology
Comments? Make a thread on our forum.
This page: Keeping up: Twitter me. Blog. Join the forum.

Twitter Valerie as multifacetedval

About The Metaphor -- Resources Series on Memes

This essay series will present some of the memes as metaphors used in American culture today by TV writers, comedians, pop culture, marketing and business trainers and advertisers, politicians, and so many others to communicate information and persuade audiences. Along the way, we will discuss new words and images that enrich the modern English language and society as our vocabulary and concepts grow.

Richard Dawkins claims to have first coined the word, claims Wikipedia:

"As a unit of cultural evolution, a meme in some ways resembles a gene. Richard Dawkins, in his book, The Selfish Gene,[1] recounts how and why he coined the term meme to describe how one might extend Darwinian principles to explain the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. He gave as examples tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothing-fashions, and the technology of building arches."

Memes are discussed in Darwinian terms, since the primary memes behind the idea are viruses and evolution. Another quote from the Wikipedia page says it well:

"Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (similarly to Darwinian biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success. So with memes, some ideas will propagate less successfully and become extinct, while others will survive, spread, and, for better or for worse, mutate."

I first became aware of memes from an article in Whole Earth Review. Winter 1987, in the article Memetics: the science of information viruses by Keith Henson. You can read some of the older article from selected back copies Look for this one: Howard Rheingold, "Untranslatable Words", Whole Earth Review #57: 3-8, which is available through Abe Books.

A website with software that uses XML to diagram concepts: Mind Map Software Could this be done without a knowledge of memes?

Books on memes are available everywhere. Try these resources.

The 2 images above are called "Tumbling" and "Greecian Swirl." They are fractal flames by Valerie. Get mugs, t-shirts, journal, and cards with these images. And check-out the memes used as bullets for the section headings. All of these images of ©VCCTI are available as mugs and stuff and as presentation template designs. Just follow the links!