Tropes & Memes

Tropes are recurrent figures, images, patterns which organize a way of thinking. The repetition of a trope tends to reiterate or at least carry traces of it's historical meaning and function. They circulate as convention, but also as shorthand tactics for conveying meaning. Memes however were pitched by Dawkins as the cultural, semantic equivalent of a gene. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.