Interesting comments on the MEME THEME...

PSYCHOHISTORY

In his Foundation Trilogy (later to be extended in additional books), the
prolific science fiction/fact writer Isaac Asimov told a story of a small
group of people who secretly steered the course of history using technology
that we would now recognize as an outgrowth of memetics. By recognizing
group psychology and the effect of various memes on populations, they were
able (Asimov creates) to shorten the intergalactic Dark Ages by millennia.

Is such a thing possible? We are seeing the beginnings of attempts at
memetic engineering today. Advertisers are designing memes that are
becoming fairly effective at penetrating populations, in hope that they
will carry with them a message influencing consumer buying behavior. Have
you heard someone say "I love ya, man!" lately? Anheuser-Busch is delighted
if you have.

More broadly, I'm seeing a steady trickle of organizations copying and
mutating successful Profit Viruses (MLMs) and Power Viruses (cults). It's
an interesting question whether the population as a whole will ever build
up an "immunity" to this kind of thing, or whether the
evolutionary-psychology buttons of lust, power, fear, and so on are too
powerful to overcome.

Who knows? There may have been a small group of Illuminati steering us for
millennia past without us even knowing...

from: http://www.memecentral.com/mu/mu0005.htm

 

selfish gene theory

The gene-centered view of evolution, gene selection theory or selfish gene theory holds that natural selection acts through differential survival of competing genes, increasing the frequency of those alleles whose phenotypic effects successfully promote their own propagation. According to this theory, adaptations are the phenotypic effects through which genes achieve their propagation.

memes and memplexes

Memeplexes have been employed recently in attempts to understand religion. In the case of Christianity, the idea suggests, the Christian memeplex "evolved" based upon the Jewish religious teachings, among others, to eventually form the Catholic church, followed by various schisms leading to the Eastern Orthodox churches and various Protestant churches. In this process, various theologians, political leaders, writers, and religious visionaries have added and deleted individual memes from the Christian memeplex resulting in the formation of new but related memeplexes, or (religions/sects). The process of schism, like evolution, is ongoing, and as a result smaller and less differentiated memeplexes have arisen within the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions. The same process could be said to be occurring in the case of many sets of belief.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memeplex

 

Inspiration and Free Minds

New article of mine on Inspiration:

 

http://www.freeminds.org/Inspiration.htm

 

I'm not big on inspirational dailies (last one was Far Side), but as of last week I now get Seth Grodin's blogcast. I quote him from today, in reference to his prediction of changes in society due to the internet:

 

You're not going to win a Pulitzer Prize

What an opportunity (for someone) to start taking advantage of the huge pool of talent and passion that is moving online, and to work to raise the bar. We don't need more gossip sites from celebrity magazine editors. We need to identify and reward voices that push hard against the status quo, that report eagerly and accurately and that speak truth to power.

Here's what we're going to miss, and quite soon: the cost of having a printing press and the money to run one meant that there were newspapers with gravitas. Newspapers that invested for the long haul, that stood for something, that spoke up. When you can launch a blog for nothing and disappear quite easily if it doesn't work, the gravitas is a lot more difficult to find. When the newspapers are gone (and it's happening a lot faster than the people in the industry are able to admit) that's what we're going to miss the most.

The opportunity, then, is to organize and network and identify and reward that activity when it happens online. Not because the site is owned by a paper or because the founder has connections to the old media. No, because they're doing work that matters.

I think what Grodin means is a branding of a collective. When people work in tandem to produce community, coupled with tolerance for dissent and a vision for the future, the demands of cooperation will necessitate policies insuring their continued stability and trustworthiness. People will come to trust you, and believe in your vision.

For an example of a great writing style, take a look at this article re: Gary Larson's The Far Side. In my opinion, it is a work of art. Note the richness and depth of the content, cloaked in a satirist' wit:

"The Far Side" was eventually picked up by 1,900 newspapers and translated into 17 languages. Twice the Dayton Daily News inadvertently translated it into "Dennis the Menace," by switching the captions on the side-by-side panels. (It didn't do much for "The Far Side," but greatly improved "Dennis the Menace," as in the cartoon in which Dennis tells his doting mother, "I see your little, petrified skull ... labeled and resting on a shelf somewhere," a line that had been intended for a Neolithic fortune-teller.)

If you want to read some home-grown examples of art in words, read our own CoCo's Blog, and Gary's Armageddon Okies. How could I pass up this talent?

No one is a fool for assuming something as factual--until it requires a greater commitment to that fact, and one proceeds to ignore the damning evidence otherwise. A Dogzism