It is a ridiculous word it should never be used. It's a public relations coup that somebody has achieved by inventing this word. Islam deserves no more protection from being ridiculed than Christianity does and nobody talks about Christianophobia. I do attack Islam but Islamophobia is, of course, a ridiculous word. I am actually an equal opportunity anti-theist. People attack one tweet and don't take into account everything else one has written. There are risks in the sheer brevity of Twitter and it's actually quite an elegant art reducing what you have to say to 140 characters and it's something that I quite enjoy attempting to do.Īs for Islamophobia, I get accused of avoiding talking about Islam and only talking about Christianity just as often as I get attacked for Islamophobia.
Do you think Twitter is an effective communication channel for these sorts of conversations? You also made some comments about abortion. And sometimes you seems to stir up Twitstorms - recently you were accused of Islamophobia following comments about Medhi Hasan. You are quite active on Twitter and seem to get involved in some healthy debates there.
There are risks in the sheer brevity of Twitter and it's actually quite an elegant art reducing what you have to say to 140 characters and it's something that I quite enjoy attempting to do 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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