What Does This Mean?
A meme changing form as it spreads, through remixes, parodies, caption changes or reinterpretation by different communities, until later versions can differ a lot from the original.
REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE
""The original photo was a joke about a dog, but after a year of memetic mutation it is a template for office complaints.""
LORE & ORIGIN
Wikipedia's article on internet memes says memes mutate as they spread, with meaning or form changing through remixing and reinterpretation, and traces "memetic" to Richard Dawkins' 1976 coinage of "meme" as a unit of cultural transmission. It also reports that Dawkins described internet memes as a deliberate "hijacking" of the idea, since the changes come from human creativity rather than random copying errors. No dated first use of the phrase is documented in the sources opened. It is the changing-form process, unlike meme fatigue or meme saturation, which describe waning appeal.
MENTIONS OVER TIME
Radar observation data not yet available for this term.
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