I think Wikipedia puts it quite well:
> An internet meme, commonly known as just a meme, is an activity, concept, catchphrase, or piece of media that spreads, often as mimicry or for humorous purposes, from person to person via the Internet.
The spreading from person to person being the crucial part.
And now that they've been digitized, you can guarantee that at least one of us here is going to do our part to fulfill the original and best purpose of the internet, which is to share funny pictures of cats. These are extraordinary specimens!
Agreed.
> it needs to be adopted and adapted by
I don't think you get to target your pedantism quite so tightly.
A meme before about 2005 was "an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture" (m-w.com).
The "image macro" meaning (meme-ing?) with adaptation is a very recent interpretation (lolcats and icanhazcheezburger?), and as you said above, "a lot of people" don't necessarily even think of "meme" that way.
Then people on the web decided they needed a word for “popular funny picture with lots of remixes”, and adopted that word (maybe as a joke?).
I probably got it from study of artificial intelligence/machine learning/evolutionary algorithms - I had no indication most of the others in my discussions had read The Selfish Gene either.
> The spreading from person to person being the crucial part.
The article says:
"They were called postcards, or souvenir cards, and mailing them to friends and relatives was immensely popular for sharing a gilded, snowy holiday scene or even a lolcat."
I still think there is a difference between individually forwarding a funny picture to others, and what a meme is.
In order to be a meme, I should have said that it needs to be adopted and adapted by a collective of people.
A postcard sent by me to my friends with a cute cat is not a meme. An image macro that I make and share to a collective group of my friends and them making variations of it makes the image a meme.
And when they send it to others, who send it to others, then it is a meme.
Or, at least, that should be required to make it a central example of the concept?
(Or perhaps an instance of one or more memes? But that would probably a definition and inconvenient to say, so I will say yes,)
that image is a meme.
Wait! People nowadays don’t know what a postcard is?
People mailed them to each other.
Memes seem to have a culture jamming aspect to them. I don't think brands would sit well with that.