"When you imitate someone else, something is passed on. This 'something' can be passed on again, and again, and so take on a life of its own."
I think that this is very apparent with regards to my subjects, that they are imitating people of the 60s by wearing similar clothes and imitating their outlook on life. The subjects are also imitating current psychedelia bands by again wearing similar clothes and having the same outlook. The subjects may also imitate the people of the 60s by the ingestion of psychedelics such as LSD as this was a popular thing to do within the counterculture.
"Everything that is passed from person to person is a meme. This includes all the words in your vocabulary, the stories you know, the skills and habits you have picked up from others and the games you like to play. It includes the songs you sing and the rules you obey. So, for example, whenever you drive on the left (or the right!), eat curry with a lager or pizza and coke, whistle the theme tune from Neighbours or even shake hands, you are dealing in memes. Each of these memes has evolved in its own unique way with its own history, but each of them is using your behaviour to get itself copied."
I had not realised before reading this book how memes work, or even how they affected us so greatly in day to day life. The members of the psychedelic community are essentially a product of memes. It would be very interesting to find out what memes influenced individuals but I think there would be a lot of circumstances only relevant to said individual rather than the whole group, i.e. their parents taste in music.
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