Imitation and Meme
In order to move safely in the water, humans imitated frogs and created breaststroke to help them adapt the water; in order to fly freely in the sky, humans copied birds and innovated planes to achieve their dreams; in order to tramp securely during the war, humans resembled butterflies and designed jungle fatigues to reduce deaths. Obviously, humans like to imitate biology of other species to make lives easier and more convenient than before. One of the famous psychologists, Susan Blackmore, analyzes why humans like to imitate other things, such as animals, memes, in her essay titled “Strange Creatures”. Blackmore suggests that imitation makes humans different from other species. Then, she introduces a related word, meme that anything is passed on by people, a word, a behavior, an idea and so on. Some characteristics of meme are imitable, competitive and selfish. People want to spread memes in their lives, although they know that some of memes are useless for them. Blackmore states that meme is selfish and meme does not care about others. However, in some certain circumstances, memes do give people who spread them some benefits.
As we all know, increasing number of people pay much more attention to educate their children. They want their kids have better educations and have better lives. Back to twentieth century, only few families are willing to send their daughters or sons go abroad to study. At that time, almost everyone who study abroad and came back to hometown all had better jobs or had better views of the world. Some rigid parents begun to admire those people who send their kids oversea and started to copy their ways of educating children. Meme was started. Blackmore defines, “Everything that is passed from person to person in this way is a meme” (37). She describes that “memes ‘want’ to get copies, ‘want’ you to pass them on and ‘do not care’ what that means to you” (37). What Blackmore is trying to say is that memes are selfish and they only care about their goals. However, in this case, meme does give people benefits: parents who send their kids oversea let children enlarge knowledge.
Another example is very normal in lives. With the fast-developed society, people prefer to surf on the Internet, not only for entertaining themselves, but for making lives convenient. People get lazier than before. Most people like to stay at home to do things unless they have to go outside, so businessmen create a new way to run their business, selling products on the Internet. At the beginning, people were afraid of buying commodities because they must pay money before they saw the real goods and they did not trust the suppliers. Only few people bought goods from the Internet and almost of them gave positive feedbacks to others. Because of those positive feedbacks, much more people started to shop on the Internet and tried to build trusted relationships with suppliers. Sharing feedbacks with others is a meme. Many people hear about buying products on the Internet can be trusted and they try