http://greylodge.org/torrents/drgrey/TheArtOfMemetics_PirateEdition.pdf
Might be worth a read. This is by Wes Unruh, one of the main contributers to Grey Lodge and Alterati.
I'm about half way through this now.
Most interestingly, this gets easier and more practical minded the further in I read. We should really consider talking over and implementing some of these ideas for the GASMs and our propaganda. I can think of at least 2 ideas we could do right now, with minimal effort and possible large payoff.
which ones? i'm close to halfway and i kept picking up on some ideas as well. it seems to begin with abstraction after abstraction but as i get further concrete examples begin to develop.
are you refering to "developing techniques to offset handicaps of individuals within the group?" part?
or perhaps developing upon the idea of the Zeigarnik Effect..
as i'm reading i'm making connections that seem to answer your earlier question regarding ways of altering another's belief system. for instance the part where the authors say
Quote
you don't convince someone by pushing what you believe against what they believe. It is when their belief system is questioning itself that you can lean in and offer what you want them to do or believe as the answer to the instability. Point out contradictions inherent in their belief system and they themeslves may throw it out of balance. Get them to question one end of their beliefs using another end and then offer your meme as the solution to the feelings of doubt
it might be useful to take that "best of memebombs" thread and rate them. picking out some of the more advantageous ones and possibly refining them based on ideal memetic structure and putting them into action.
more to read. i'm finding that this book is a fast primer on cybernetics, systems theory and various other ideas that i've only touched on...back to the book
The Zeigarnik Effect was certainly something I had in mind. I'm going to go through this again tonight and make notes on what we could actually do with the information.
So far I have devoured about 70 pages and it just keeps getting better.
This has been an excellent find, though a little dense for casual reading.
I really like the author's usage of the word "magic." He pushes that if magic is only good for personal, subjective things, we should at least take some of the other cool ideas that have arisen from Chaos Magic et all and examine them under the lens of other disciplines. The term Egregore, for example, seems so much more tangible to me when we talk about it in cybernetic / memetic terms than as some sort of magic living collective thoughtform.
Moar thoughts when I have time.
Quote from: Professor Cramulus on April 01, 2008, 03:45:28 PM
So far I have devoured about 70 pages and it just keeps getting better.
This has been an excellent find, though a little dense for casual reading.
I really like the author's usage of the word "magic." He pushes that if magic is only good for personal, subjective things, we should at least take some of the other cool ideas that have arisen from Chaos Magic et all and examine them under the lens of other disciplines. The term Egregore, for example, seems so much more tangible to me when we talk about it in cybernetic / memetic terms than as some sort of magic living collective thoughtform.
Moar thoughts when I have time.
I think its a great example of multiple models... this reads almost identically to The Book Of Atem, except that Hine is using the magic model.
Very nice.
Page 1 of Notes:
There are two models of memetics we are using concurrently; one is the seed or virus model where small scale individual signals infect hosts and predispose them to particular actions. This model is most useful for creating communications and understanding how they spread. The second is the entity model, useful for understanding political and social movements. Here we look at larger memetic structures can act on the world through people who hold the belief sets, as if the memetic entities were intentional beings
Nodal memory is a pattern that allows cyberspace to exist and this concept of nodal memory holds true for human social networks as well. The memory of individuals is a kind of nodal memory, and the interaction that individuals engage in form the connections that define the network. So in essence, there is a type of cyberspace that exists entirely on the 'hardware' of human brains and personal social interactions. This cyberspace is the 'meme space' and has been called the Noosphere by Pierre Teilhard14 before the concept of memetics was fully fleshed out by Richard Dawkins.
Memes incline the host organism to actions that further the meme's survival in some manner. Sometimes the actions increase replication via communication over various types of networks, sometimes they increase the meme's persistence in memory. Many times the actions the meme encourages adjust these two primary factors indirectly. Observed actions are a kind of communication, so memes spread via performance as well as through verbal interaction. Performing an action plants the idea of the performance as action in the minds of the observers.
Memes that depend on new technological advances in communication mediums will be more likely to encourage changes in the social order towards supporting those new mediums. Perhaps this is why the internet has triggered more memes geared toward social change than older, more established mediums. However, as society shifts to integrate the internet, the memetic content online will presumably shift to memes more supportive of this new social structure.
In contemporary society examining survival pressures means looking at the socioeconomic system within which people are embedded. Memes that make their host unemployable have smaller potential populations, and contravening the social mores and norms endangers the host's survivability and reduces the meme's communicational effectiveness. It is detrimental to memetic survival to promote behavior that destroys the host's ability to maneuver in a social space.
A useful understanding is that there are many subsystems, or circuits, within the overall system of the world. There are many paths that a signal can take through these circuits either serially or concurrently. The reactions to or transformations of our actions along these multiple pathways can either reinforce each other and increase the effects of our signals or conflict and decrease the effects. The greater the scope of our understanding the greater our ability to release signals that will be reinforced by more subsystems, and correspondingly the greater potential our actions can have toward manifesting change on the world.
A simple psychological trick exists where if one is told two pieces of information separated by a 'but' one is more likely to remember the phrase after the 'but'. The technique then, widely used by advertisers, is to raise a weak form of the objections to their message at the beginning and to answer with the message they intend to get across.
In the memetic ideosphere, the persona or projected self is created by a process of remixing the available memes, and subcultures form around deforming, transforming, or refusing specific aspects of their cultural memepool. Sorting and selecting from the memes available, most of us pre-consciously create a composite identity that is worn as a vehicle to navigate and negotiate social spaces. The act of selecting a self out of memes is a conceptual bricolage which produces a persona.
SWEET!
I'm doing this in bite-size pieces, so that those who dont read the book can still benefit from it.
In the memetic ideosphere, the persona or projected self is created by a process of remixing the available memes, and subcultures form around deforming, transforming, or refusing specific aspects of their cultural memepool. Sorting and selecting from the memes available, most of us pre-consciously create a composite identity that is worn as a vehicle to navigate and negotiate social spaces. The act of selecting a self out of memes is a conceptual bricolage which produces a persona.
Stress itself is an emotional marker, and an agitator of memetic evolution. Things that place one under stress have survival significance to older physiological systems so the experiences that are paired with stress are more memorable. Bonds formed in the face of stress are more intense.
Memes use communication to change things about the world. Changing someone's emotional state makes physiological changes in their body and alters the actions they are likely to take.
However, there is no reason to assume memetics requires language to operate. All identity construction, in addition to being a kind of bricolage, is also existent only within a social context. You do not have an identity without some kind of community formation against which to project that identity. This community space is also a theater in which performance and stress builds connections....The propaganda of the deed is most commonly pictured as terrorism, but can mean any dramatic or awe-inspiring action designed as communication. In the past the actions only affected those who were physically present. If those not present were effected it was via a retelling or textualizing. Today's media environment in which events and actions are filmed, associated with various emotional markers through juxtaposition and shown directly to many people repeatedly has widened the impact of these types of communication. It is against this backdrop of our current communication structure that terrorism has gained its modern power and prevalence, as it is one thing to be told that hundreds of people have died in an event, but it is quite another thing entirely to be shown the event in all its drama, movement, and color.
As egregores are also capable of transmitting memes, they too are a memetic body. The meme has an extension into time and space, and to affect its vector, its direction, one must enter into this extension and apply some force to it. The most obvious method, and most widely used historically in changing a memetic vector, is to physically alter or constrain the behavior of the meme bearing members (an example that springs to mind is the historical cases of heresy being prosecuted by the Catholic Church). Another method involves transmitting an engineered phage into the memetic network to devour the meme.
You don't convince someone by pushing what you believe against what they believe. It is when their belief system is questioning itself that you can lean in and offer what you want them to do or believe as the answer to the instability. Point out contradictions inherent in their belief system and they themselves may throw it out of balance. Get them to question one end of their beliefs using another end and then offer your meme as the solution to the feelings of doubt.
In applying these ideas on an individual level, you must first understand your position within a larger social cluster, figure out where your strongest incoming signals are originating, and begin modeling, sketching out, mind-mapping, or otherwise diagramming your position. Just being aware of your social network in real life, and via virtual extensions, will prime you to see opportunities, both for yourself and for the people you know. Actively connecting people or nodes together to more densely mesh the network can result in a pattern integrity effect which improves the quality of feedback. It is possible that the route through a network your information moves seems contrary to your goal but your actions will only bring you closer to your goals if it is compatible with the motion of the ecology of the network.
question, i fully intend to read the book, are these notes sort of a spoiler? they are shorter to print out :)
They're points I find interesting or useful. They may not give you the full picture, but if you dont currently have the time to read them, these should spark some ideas.
SNAPE KILLS RICHARD DAWKINS ON PAGE 137
:lulz: :lulz:
:lol:
The necessary component of a meme-signal to exposure is its attractiveness or noticeableness. If the signal is sufficiently different from surrounding signals and appears new or fresh it will garner enough attention to give it a chance at being picked up by a new node, or 'infected'. To carry over from exposure to infection the meme must address itself to the needs and priorities of the potential nodal host. The needs of the host are partially influenced by its prior acceptance of previous memes from the same nodal network, which is part of the reason why we see memes clustered around each other conceptually.
An interesting facet of human behavior is that we don't react emotionally to a situation, but rather we react to the meaning we have attached to the given situation. Memes then work by associating situations with emotions that the organism reacts by acting to fulfill the situation if the associations are positive or avoid the situation if the associations are negative.
For the most part, we live in a world constructed by language. What and how we see the world is tied directly to how we describe it. In many ways, the fact that the English language has divided the noun and the verb does the English speaker a great disservice. Nowhere is there a noun not participating in a process, nor a verb not embodied in physical matter. Our descriptions limit how we move through space and the possibilities we can imagine in relation to the manipulation of objects. The spell of noun-language has convinced us that change is difficult, that things must remain as we have labeled them.
There are three egregore types, those being religious, institutional, and corporate egregores. Religious egregores are the most readily understood as meme carriers as it is usually the religion's task to spread the egregore's mind share by any means necessary. These egregores are symbolically represented in the archetypes of the deity or deities of the religion, along with whatever embodiment of evil that deity may oppose. The physical accretions of the egregore then are the temples, structures, and iconography made manifest by and at the commission of the religion's followers. Often these entities have moved across different languages in their spread and, correspondingly, they become adaptable across cultures, yet they rely on embedded mythologies and archetypes to resonate, bond, and spread in new cultural environments.
Institutional egregores are more perverse, more recent, and tend to be geographically bound. The United States Government is run by egregores manifesting Uncle Sam and the Goddess Columbia, when viewed from this perspective. Academic institutions generate egregore personifications as well, often producing them in ritualized settings through mascots. The marketer and the memeticist often have difficulty with these institutions, because the lifespan of these egregores significantly outweighs an individual's ability to gather enough information on the lifecycle of these bodies, as well as religious egregores even longer cycles.
Last of the three is the corporate egregore, the youngest of all egregores, coming into its own in the United States in a federal court in 1886, when justices decreed corporations to be legal persons in their own right, capable of owning property or being held responsible for damages. However, these are technically immortal bodies, impossible to kill or physically punish as an entity (although a more powerful government egregore can appropriate its assets.) Thanks to the countless companies which pop in and out of existence, the memeticist and marketer can get a much more useful sampling of group minds, operating at various efficiencies, to extrapolate actionable data that can be applied to egregore engineering and understanding this new direction of human evolution.
When we intentionally learn a skill we go through four phases. Unconscious incompetence, when we can't do it and aren't aware of it. Conscious incompetence, when we know we can't do it. Conscious competence, when we know we can do it as long as we focus on what we're doing. And lastly unconscious competence, when we do it while no longer needing to be totally conscious of how we are doing it.
Within the semiotic code of language, abstract words are actually descriptors of recognized patterns. If one has already been exposed to a complete pattern, then exposure to an incomplete pattern will cause the brain to complete the loop. If one does not know the complete pattern, then exposure to the partial pattern will trigger an effect that Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik identified. The "Zeigarnik Effect" is how an incomplete pattern never fully drops into one's unconscious but remains free-floating in the preconscious mind.
Narrative is a primary pattern of the neurology of conscious thought. It is a pattern of linear causative relations that is particularly compelling once it is recognized.
When we say that someone believes something, what we are saying is that they act as if that something is true. If the topic related to that thing arises, they express their belief in the veracity of the thing. When a situation affected by that belief arises, they take actions which are consistent with that belief.
If a person encounters fragments of a consistent whole in separate places as separate experiences the pattern recognizing action of the brain will most likely identify the consistency of the material as a series of discrete parts to be assembled into a whole. Modular narratives, relying on discontinuity to heighten the audience's tension, are as of this writing beginning to become a trend in advertising, because of the implications of the "Zeigarnik Effect."
So long as a person has a part of the puzzle that needs completion, the "Zeigarnik Effect" will spur that person on to locate the missing pieces
Things that place one under stress have survival significance to older physiological systems, which is why experiences that are paired with stress are imprinted more strongly into the preconscious mind. As a result, bonds formed in the face of stress are more intense. As long as our responses to stress are fixed and predictable anyone aware of this can direct us like puppets.
The hardest lesson to learn is being able to let go, relax, and anticipate transformation. Ultimately, the recognition that the world is already always changing is vital to actually changing the world in your favor. The world is a process in motion. Some changes may not be immediately possible but changing the world to engineer that possibility, keeping in mind that every action you take is compounded by time to influence the pressure you exert.
Understanding your objective and focusing on it, explaining it to others in your social network, and allowing that interaction to guide you will inevitably lead you to where you need to be. Kurt Vonnegut tells us that 'you are what you pretend to be', but more accurately the phrase should be you become what you do. Pretending is acting as if something is true and it is that acting that is imprinted into the preconscious and unconscious mind over time.
Understanding the impact a role can have on an identity as that identity moves forward through time is an essential tool in triggering self-transformation, as well as watching out for signs of personality seepage. Neurolinguistic programming is based in many ways around the concept of modeling a role to cause changes in behaviors, but not all changes are desirable. Being aware of the potential of self-change before engaging in a role, and understanding that the longer a role is engaged in, the longer-lasting the effect of that role on one's personality is essential to effective self-actualization.
We have access to an overwhelming array of information that can help us, but at the same time the burden of evaluating this information lies heavily upon us. We now pick and choose among the signals that reach us, and in fact must do so because the contradictory signals we receive create their own kinds of stress. Understanding all the ways in which one lacks control over one's existence allows for compensation, starting within one's consciousness and moving into the greater social group in which one is embedded.
I'm going to keep posting notes until we get some sort of discussion going.
What appears to be occurring is that there is now a creation of two classes, those for whom the information glut is liberating, and those whom it controls35. But while the signals teaching people how to empower themselves exist, the messages of conformity and limitation are more plentiful and subsequently more adapted toward hegemony. For those who dive in and navigate the information can see the structures that manipulate it, while those who would drown if they went below the surface remain the 'led'.
We are embedded in a sea of memetic content, this content is determined now by the collective pool of individuals more now than ever before, and people have more control over what memes they are exposed to as a result. This also means that people can cocoon themselves in media that confirms their pre-existing biases, and this is where fractal notions of self-similarity in memetic construction can smuggle across new energy; mimic an outer layer and create an entrainment by properly encoded semantic value and any stagnate memetic ecology will rapidly mutate. To do this properly takes both skill and experience, yet thanks to the interconnected nature of daily life, we all now have relatively equal potential to initiate such a catalyst. All the information we need to accomplish anything already exists and for the most part is already available to us.
If the only world people know is the story told after the fact then changing the story changes their world. Changing people's worlds also changes what they do. This obviously gives the storyteller immense power, and put into practice this falls under the idea of a hypertext.
Memes are at the conversion point where the flow of desire transforms into actions taken. They attach themselves to the needs/desire and motivate action. All memes contain an action for someone to carry out. Many times that action will be further spreading the meme but other times it will include other actions such as voting for a candidate or buying a product.
What component will have the most influence on the outcome of an interaction depends on what cyberneticists call requisite variety. Requisite variety is the number of options available to the component as a response to an input. The component, and therefore the person, with the most options available are at a distinct advantage in an interaction.
There are three points in the response process that we can concentrate on increasing our variety in a useful way. We can work on our inputs, our processing, or our output. If we choose to concentrate on our input than what we would do is increase the subtlety of the distinctions we make. We would work on increasing the number of patterns we recognize. If we concentrate on our output then we increase the number of responses we can make. Increase the subtlety of our output and learn new ways of expressing ourselves. Finally, we can work on our processing. This is perhaps the most difficult to do. What you would want to do with the processing is to arrange the connections between the input and the best possible output in relation to it.
Memes can be transmitted through inimitable behaviors, and when presented with complimentary framing, there is an emotional transference from frame to meme that occurs beneath the awareness of the average individual.
Second Life is a system for meeting and interacting with acquaintances while World of Warcraft is a system for forming guilds and raiding parties, not to mention exploration, character development, and an open-ended, yet expansive narrative. While some people are fascinated with SL, a lot more people are addicted to WoW. Encountering and enduring stress together in a shared modality is a way to create bonds between people, be that modality a job, a virtual space, a group activity, an audience... any space in which all the participants are equally (or believed to be equally) engaged within the same modality.
Dammit, I'm still trying to keep up!
Tell me about it. I'm reading the book and I'm just getting around to synthesizing the ideas, let alone coming up with anything resembling a sensible reply.
BUMP!
Joesph Matheny has a podcast on this book and the general topic, for your listening pleasure
http://www.alterati.com/gspot/thegspot_30.mp3
Quote from: Cain on April 14, 2008, 10:45:53 PM
BUMP!
Joesph Matheny has a podcast on this book and the general topic, for your listening pleasure
http://www.alterati.com/gspot/thegspot_30.mp3
Podcast was kind of meh.
They started off talking about the book, and did for a few minutes, but the asinine show host kept derailing the conversation to talk about how ebook piracy affects book sales. He also cut two or three commercials for his show / website right into the dialogue. Really annoying.
But the Grey Lodge cats were really cool to listen to. They're (as one might predict) quite well spoken. It's just too bad they didn't get to talk about the book more.
One funny moment was where one of the writers mentioned that (in the print edition of the book) there's a "shoutout" on page 23 acknowledgement 23.. and he wouldn't say whom he was shouting-out to, but you can figure that out on your own.
heheheh - I wonder how many lunatic freak cultures identify with the number 23, and who thought that part was talking about
them. Good memetics. :lol:
Quote from: Professor Cramulus on April 27, 2008, 02:58:14 PMOne funny moment was where one of the writers mentioned that (in the print edition of the book) there's a "shoutout" on page 23 acknowledgement 23.. and he wouldn't say whom he was shouting-out to, but you can figure that out on your own.
yeah i caught that. didn't even notice it was on page 23, but seeing "hodgepodge
23" appear in a text will get my attention, yeah :)
Saved to gdocs for further review and dissemination.