Milk & Cereal Montage
Downloaded from YouTube
The Milk & Cereal video is an example of a popular Internet meme found on YouTube®. Richard Dawkins, who coined the term in his book The Selfish Gene (1976), defined the meme as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation." He used it to describe how one might extend evolutionary principles to explain the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena.
The popularity of the Milk & Cereal meme, (many thousands can be viewed on YouTube), is a sad indicator of how completely we have swallowed the ad campaigns of the cereal market. More troubling, as our common cultural heritage continues to atomize in the face of globalization and technology, the communal experiences we share and replicate are increasingly supplied by ad campaigns.