A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures. In popular language, a meme may refer to an Internet meme, typically an image, that is remixed, copied, and circulated in a shared cultural experience online.
Memetics is the study of information and culture based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution. Proponents describe memetics as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. Memetics describes how an idea can propagate successfully, but doesn't necessarily imply a concept is factual. Critics contend the theory is "untested, unsupported or incorrect". It has failed to become a mainstream approach to cultural evolution as the research community has favored models that exclude the concept of a cultural replicator, opting mostly for gene-culture co-evolution instead.
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.
Susan Jane Blackmore is a British writer, lecturer, sceptic, broadcaster, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Plymouth. Her fields of research include memetics, parapsychology, consciousness, and she is best known for her book The Meme Machine. She has written or contributed to over 40 books and 60 scholarly articles and is a contributor to The Guardian newspaper.
goatse.cx, often referred to simply as Goatse, was originally an Internet shock site. Its front page featured a picture entitled hello.jpg, showing a hunched-over naked man using both hands to stretch open his anus, which was "lit a queasy red" by the camera flash.
Phishing is a type of social engineering where an attacker sends a fraudulent message designed to trick a person into revealing sensitive information to the attacker or to deploy malicious software on the victim's infrastructure like ransomware. Phishing attacks have become increasingly sophisticated and often transparently mirror the site being targeted, allowing the attacker to observe everything while the victim is navigating the site, and transverse any additional security boundaries with the victim. As of 2020, phishing is by far the most common attack performed by cybercriminals, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Centre recording over twice as many incidents of phishing than any other type of computer crime.
The ideosphere—like the noosphere —is the metaphysical 'place' where thoughts, theories, ideas, and ideation are regarded to be created, evaluated, and evolved.
Flooding or scrolling on an IRC network is a method of disconnecting users from an IRC server, exhausting bandwidth which causes network latency ('lag'), or just disrupting users. Floods can either be done by scripts or by external programs.
An Internet meme, more commonly known simply as a meme, is an idea, behavior, image, or style that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. What is considered a meme may vary across different communities on the Internet and is subject to change over time. Traditionally, they were a concept or catchphrase, but the concept has since become broader and more multi-faceted, evolving to include more elaborate structures such as challenges, GIFs, videos, and viral sensations.
iAsiaWorks was an ISP and Internet data center (IDC) from 2000–2001 during the final days of the dot-com era, which built state-of-the-art data centers in Hong Kong, Taipei, Seoul and other cities. Its IPO on the NASDAQ was IAWK on Aug 19th, 2000.
Tom Cross, also known as Decius, is an American computer security expert and hacker.
A memetic algorithm (MA) in computer science and operations research, is an extension of the traditional genetic algorithm. It may provide a sufficiently good solution to an optimization problem. It uses a local search technique to reduce the likelihood of premature convergence.
A lolcat, or LOLcat, is an image macro of one or more cats. The image's text is often idiosyncratic and intentionally grammatically incorrect, and is known as lolspeak.
Howard Keith Henson is an American electrical engineer and writer. Henson writes on subjects including space engineering, space law, memetics, cryonics, evolutionary psychology, and the physical limitations of Transhumanism. In 1975, Henson founded the L5 Society with his then-wife Carolyn Meinel to promote space colonization. In 1987 the L5 Society merged with the National Space Institute to form the National Space Society.
Telecomix is a decentralized cluster of net activists, committed to the freedom of expression and is a name used by both WeRebuild and Telecomix. WeRebuild is a collaborative project used to propose and discuss laws as well as to collect information about politics and politicians. The Telecomix is the operative body that executes schemes and proposals presented by the WeRebuild. On September 15, 2011, Telecomix diverted all connections to the Syrian web, and redirected internauts to a page with instructions to bypass censorship.
Nick Levay (1977–2021) also known as Rattle was an American computer security expert and hacker. He was the Chief Security Officer at the Council on Foreign Relations and other organizations such as Carbon Black and the Center for American Progress. From 2018–2021 he was the President of the NGO-ISAC, an Information Sharing and Analysis Center nonprofit serving US-based non-governmental organizations.
Viral phenomena are objects or patterns that are able to replicate themselves or convert other objects into copies of themselves when these objects are exposed to them. Analogous to the way in which viruses propagate, the term viral pertains to a video, image, or written content spreading to numerous online users within a short time period. This concept has become a common way to describe how thoughts, information, and trends move into and through a human population.
/pol/, short for "Politically Incorrect", is an anonymous political discussion imageboard on 4chan. As of 2022, it is the most active board on the site. It has had a substantial impact on Internet culture while acting as a platform for far-right extremism; the board is notable for its widespread racist, white supremacist, antisemitic, anti-Muslim, misogynist, and anti-LGBT content. /pol/ has been linked to various acts of real-world extremist violence. It has been described as one of the "[centers] of 4chan mobilization", a title previously considered to have belonged solely to /b/.
Wei Dai is a computer engineer known for contributions to cryptography and cryptocurrencies. He developed the Crypto++ cryptographic library, created the b-money cryptocurrency system, and co-proposed the VMAC message authentication algorithm. The smallest subunit of Ether, the wei, is named after him.
Memetic warfare is a modern type of information warfare and psychological warfare involving the propagation of memes on social media.
