What are y’alls thoughts on memetics/thought contagion? It seems like a science in need of a unit to me. What does a meme do? look like? act like?talk like?
It’s an interesting concept, in the sense that memes are any idea that may be passed from one brain to another. Do you think this theory came out of an observation of mass media, which seems to be the arena in which memetics may find it’s greatest use? I mean advertisement is an excercise in the transferance of memes in order to sell a product. The greater the number of people that recognize the meme of your product, the better chance a company has at selling it’s goods. It’s about the reoccurance and the replication of the idea in as many people as possible.
The opposite of what I just described would be the transferance of knowledge on a small or individual scale; the authentic, the personal transferance between teacher and student.
Yeh, memetics is an interesting field of study. It has a bit of biology, psychology, philosophy and media studies in its models. Memes are sometimes modeled as viruses to make understanding their spreading and workings a bit easier.
An example: Person A tells person B that some product is good, but person A’s perceived value of the product is not based on logical basis about the value (usefulness) of the product. Instead it is based on false belief (meme), which assures person A that he is right. A meme-contagion might be caused by some form of media or just talking to other people. I think some of the reason for this might lie in the false belief in the authority of the source of the meme (a suggestion by a figure of authority, athletes in Nike-ads etc). In the case of some people (usually young) this can be enforced by at least following kind of thinking:
“If I buy these, these people will accept me” (the need to belong)
and/or “If I buy these people will think I am cool” (status) and/or
“If I don’t have these I will get beaten or laughed at” (peer pressure).
So person A, who has based his judgement of the product on the perceived social value of the product, instead of the usefulness of the product, transmits the ‘contagion’ to person B. Person B again makes the calls wether to transmit the ideavirus forward.
So more and more ads use the memetic approach of attaching social values to their products. I’ve seen probably hundreds of ads with some alcohol with the possibility of sex implied when drinking this stuff. However it is logically highly improbable that if I go to a bar and order a certain brand of alcohol I will score later on just because I am drinking this brand. Ads have gone from containing information to containing unprovable/illusionary social benefits.
I recall reading that sociologists have studied the spreading-speed of memes by using common false beliefs or ‘urban legends’ and noticed that it is rather rapid even in the realm of word-of-mouth. Y2K bug-meme had astronomical spreading speed.
Memes are not always bad, but I decided to discuss only this side for now. My example was rather rough and many memes work on much subtler levels than this, so here is a link-list to get more information from for those interested:
http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/links.html
I Like pork!!!
Well the problem is this, you can tell me where a gene stops and starts. you can’t tell me where a meme stops and starts. If you can, please do.
It’s a philosophical problem because my dick is bigger than yours and I say it’s a Philosophical problem, so there. Why not just send us a scanned picture of your unit there, Whitelotus?
Dawkins’ “Viruses of the Mind” : cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Dawkin … -mind.html
Reminds me of ‘cultural reproduction’ and what social psychology has to say about attitude formation/maintenance and the effects members of a group have on eachothers’ views.