A meme can only be classified as a meme if it has enough power to spread throughout a culture and survive transformation by each person who encounters it.
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins first coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, to refer to the most basic unit of culture in an analogy to their biological counterparts, genes. Cultural transmission of ideas allows memes to “propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation” (Dawkins, 192). By imitating predecessors and transforming their ideas, people create new works out of old material. Memes are the vehicle by which these ideas spread, small enough to allow rapid generation, replication, and transmission throughout any given culture. In fact, the “notion of the meme has itself spread in memelike fashion—it provides a compelling way to understand the dispersion of cultural movements,” which can be used in the context of any given culture (Jenkins, 19).
