Meme

Meme
A small piece of information that is transferred through a society much like genetic information is transferred though a biological organism. Richard Dawkins spawned the theory of memetics which details how memes compete for attention and predicts which meme will be the most successful. The memes that the theory highlights are considered generic memes, meaning they have no morality or independent purpose other than to exist.

Dr. Claree Graves, a researcher who combined aspects of psychology, sociology and biology to study the evolution of individuals within societies. Graves detailed the evolutionary steps of societies using letter combinations like E-F, F-G. Richard Cowen a Grave’s protégé, created Spiral Dynamics based largely of Graves’ theories. Spiral Dynamics assigns a color to each level of personal evolution. These levels are often referred to as memes (green meme, yellow meme, etc). So memes that refer to any bit of information are called generic memes while memes that refer to a personal evolution are considered value memes.