Central to understanding how we communicate is to understand what we are communicating with, not just our mouths, our brains, our language, but the structures and processes that happen when we speak and think.
Of course we all know about ideas, and how they can stick in your head, and how they spread, and even Jesus talked about stony ground, and how his ideas could fail to take root.
But have you ever thought of ideas as being subject to Darwinian natural selection? Have you ever thought of ideas as things that literally live in your head? As a poster, have you wondered about why some ideas live on in dKos and some just slide away to oblivion?
PLEASE RECOMMEND TO HOLD FOR ALL TIME ZONES.
Susan Blackmore is a professor in England who moved from studies of the paranormal and skeptical analysis to studies of consciousness.
When she encountered Richard Dawkins' concept of the meme as a fresh concept in The Selfish Gene, it triggered a series of thoughts on the replication of ideas.
As a rigorous thinker with a PhD, Blackmore has gone to a lot of trouble to establish the basic evolutionary parameters and characteristics of the concept of a meme, so much so that Dawkins wrote the introduction in glowing terms, thanking Blackmore for picking up the ball and running with it.
Blackmore's thesis is this (read carefully, it may trip you up): just as a gene is a replicator that lives on the substrate of the physical world and evolves through replication, variation, and selection, there is another Second Replicator, the meme, which lives on the substrate of the human mind, replicates, varies and is selected.
The reason to read the book and editorial reviews is to firm up one's grasp of that basic evolutionary theory, and then see how that structure will support the concept of the meme.
I am as intrigued by this concept as I am by string theory. It's such a jump intellectually to see that parallel. Even though it might be legitimate to just call a meme an idea, that isn't the point.
The point is that the mechanism where strong ideas, or memes, replicate in human brains, transmitted through communication, (not just language) can be tremendously useful to those of us who toil in the vineyards of political theory and practice as we look for ways to counter the memes that are cooked up by the Chemists of the Right and spread through the Noise Machine.
It also gives us techniques to analyze our own memes as we send them out into the cruel world of other peoples' brains.
Framing as a technique for changing the niche the meme lives in? Metaphor: how does it stick in your head?
An example from today's NY Times, in an article about human rights (a meme):
Hunt has no full explanation for how this new sense of selfhood came into being. She devotes one chapter (out of five) to arguing that an explosion of novel reading in the period contributed greatly to the development of empathy across class, sex and national lines. "Novels," she contends, "made the point that all people are fundamentally similar because of their inner feelings." But this heightened novel reading seems much more a consequence than a cause of the new feelings of equality and sympathy.
One controversial application of this "selfish meme" parallel (compare the selfish gene) results in the idea that certain collections of memes can act as "memetic viruses": collections of ideas that behave as independent life-forms which continue to get passed on — even at the expense of their hosts — simply because of their success at getting passed on. Some observers have suggested that evangelical religions and cults behave this way; so by including the act of passing on their beliefs as a moral virtue, other beliefs of the religion also get passed along even if they do not provide particular benefits to the believer.
from Memes
Strong recommend to read the entire Memes article from Wikipedia.
memelex definitions
Some useful links:
susan.blackmore@blueyonder.co.uk
http://www.publiclibraries.com/
http://www.powellsbooks.com/
http://www.dailykos.com/...
(va dare sells used books)
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