I once watched Oprah Winfrey try to explain what a meme is. When I say meme, I don't mean one of those captioned photos that people post on their Facebook feeds; I mean Richard Dawkins' notion of an idea that replicates itself and mutates the way a gene replicates itself and mutates. But Winfrey apparently misunderstood the concept and—in an inadvertent demonstration of memetic mutation—described memes as negative thoughts that get stuck in your head and hold you back from doing your best. In this way, millions of daytime-TV viewers got the impression that memes were something out of a self-help book.
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