There are things like "hope you get cancer" and "we'll enjoy laughing at you frying in hell" and that kind of thing. Have any stood out for you recently? They go straight out of my mind I'm afraid. Unlike with genes (and Dawkins' original meaning of "meme"), there is no attempt at accuracy of copying internet memes are deliberately altered. Within the piece, Dawkins explains how an "internet meme" is a hijacking of the original idea and that instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, they are altered deliberately by human creativity. The aim is, presumably, to create a piece of content that will itself become a meme, as happened with last year's performance involving 16 flying robots. In recognition of this, advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi has recruited Dawkins to participate in the theatrical piece alongside installation artists Marshmallow Laser Feast. The word - which is ascribed to an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture - has since been reappropriated by the internet, with Grumpy Cat, Socially-Awkward Penguin and Overly-Attached Girlfriend spreading virally, leaping from IP address to IP address (and brain to brain) via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. Richard Dawkins coined the word "meme" in his 1976 bestseller The Selfish Gene. However, it's precisely what he signed up for at Saatchi & Saatchi's New Directors' Showcase at the Cannes Advertising Festival this week. "Professor Dawkins' speech transmutes into an auto-tuned song about internet memes." is not a sentence you expect to read in a press release about the evolutionary biologist.
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