I've decided to re-read The Art of Memetics (http://artofmemetics.com/). This is one of my favorite books, and I want to share it with everybody. Some people consider its density an obstacle to reading, so I'd like to do my best to summarize what Ed and Wes are talking about. Feel free to comment, ask questions, etc... I will answer as best I can.
Chapter 1 - Evaluating Tools (http://artofmemetics.com/memetics/page7.html)
Memetics is the science of cultural evolution. It examines how an idea emerges and becomes integrated into a larger system's behaviors. By studying memetics, we can learn to better understand our lives and achieve our desires.
There are a few things we're going to talk about here--let's define some vocabulary.
Magic is a highly loaded term which used to represent a much broader field. Over time, the useful bits of it were carted off and transformed by other sciences (alchemy, for example, eventually became chemistry). While many occult practices are a bit dated, the language used to describe the occult is highly useful for describing ephemeral things like memes and internal states. When we talk about magic, we're using Taylor Ellwood's definition: "Magic involves making the improbable possible. It's learning how even the slightest change you make can have a radical effect on the internal system of your psychology/spirituality, and the external system of the environment and universe you live in."
A meme is (as Dawkins puts it) a "unit of cultural inheritance". It is more or less another word for an idea.
An egregore is a body capable of transmitting memes across a network. Also known as a mastermind group, it refers to a network's "hivemind". This abstraction is useful because a group of individuals displays many of the same properties as a single individual. By understandings a group's drives and personality, we will be better able to position our ideas within that group.
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.
We individuals are like cells within the bodies of numerous superorganisms. In understanding ourselves, we must learn to peel away the layers of these superorganisms without losing our sense of individuality.
The role that magic once played in our society is now performed by the media. The myths, narratives, and context which define our world are being written by wizards wielding wands of holly wood. Marketing and magic are cousins - to understand the ecosystem of ideas, we will knit the two together.
Memetic processes occur in a space which is not tied to physical geography. We can think of memetic interactions as taking place within "meme space", a virtual place that occupies the memory of a communication network. This is analogous to a "cyber space" which occurs within one's mind. It is within this meme space that we will visualize memetic systems and nodes interacting with one another.
We can also visualize memetic interactions as taking place within a population of "meme carriers" distributed along a long tail. Certain carriers are the first to pick up a meme and transmit it to others ("early innovators"). A strong meme picks up speed and support as it travels across a network. As it grows, it will leave the care of the early innovators and eventually be adapted by the majority.
Memes incline the host organism to further that meme's survival. Sometimes a meme may survive through retransmission - repeating it to others. Other times, it survives by etching itself deep into one's memory. Observed actions are a kind of communication, so memes spread via performance as well as through verbal interaction.
If we are figuring out how to change the world using memetics, one thing to keep in mind is that using a meme reinforces its own communication pattern. For example, if you use television to transmit a meme, you end up reinforcing the importance of television as well. If you communicate a message to "democrats", you are also reinforcing their identity as democrats. Memes that rely on certain populations or communication patterns have difficulty changing those patterns.
This is why, perhaps, so much cultural change emerges from the patterns surrounding new technology. As our world adapts to the presence of the internet, online communication patterns will shift to reinforce the social structures which are currently forming. Luckily, in these strange times, we have no shortage of new mediums, so it is unlikely that we will ever become locked into one cultural pattern.
Much like living organisms, memes are driven to reproduce themselves. It is in a meme's best interest to keep its host alive, healthy, and able to continue to retransmit it. For this reason, memes that make their host unemployable or less able to maneuver in social space do not often survive.
NICE.
PLEASE TO CONTINUE.
LOL, I'm in the middle of that book ATM :) Nice summation of the first chapter.
I particularly like the succinct way they lay out the "magic" term and reasoning on the first page :)
:mittens:
I only made it 2/3rds of the way through AoM, before getting distracted and losing the spare cognitive energy needed to digest it properly. This is much appreciated.
Quote from: Ratatosk on September 08, 2010, 04:57:58 PM
LOL, I'm in the middle of that book ATM :) Nice summation of the first chapter.
I particularly like the succinct way they lay out the "magic" term and reasoning on the first page :)
I took that as an analogy and moved right along.
Chapter 2 - Agency in a Networked World (http://artofmemetics.com/memetics/page15.html)
We're individuals, but we're also components of numerous larger systems. I do not believe we ever have complete control over ourselves, each of us contain numerous systems looking to further themselves through us. The question is not whether or not we have free will, but to what degree one can have freedom from these systems, and to what degree can an individual control them, given that there are other controlling factors?
The first step is to study the dynamics of memetic systems. We need to examine our inputs, outputs, how we receive a signal, transform it, and retransmit it.
We live within many nested circuits and systems. As a signal travels through these circuits, the people who are part of those pathways will transform and retransmit it. Depending on numerous factors, the signal may be reinforced and amplified, or opposed and nullified. The aim of memetics is to increase our ability to send signals which will be reinforced by more subsystems and in turn have a greater chance of manifesting change in the world.
Here's a classic marketing trick: If you give somebody two pieces of information separated by a "but", the person is more likely to remember the fact after the "but". Basically, marketers attempt to raise a weak form of objection and then defeat that objection using the information they want to communicate.
There are three reasons for this. (1) by preemptively defeating an objection, it neuters the power of that objection if encountered later (ie, if you encountered the objection later, it would be the bit following the "but"). (2) it encourages people to accept the information without examining it. And most importantly- (3) the marketer has now framed the debate in terms that are biased towards the right outcome.
So how can we resolve free will, knowing that the presentation of information is very often framed and loaded in a way that leads you to a specific conclusion? These information systems bias us towards certain behaviors.
For our purposes, it doesn't make sense to think of humans as entities totally independent of information systems. We exist in the middle world between a higher plane of symbols and language and a lower plane of archetypes and trends. We are the test tube in which these systems meet. People are parts of larger systems, and are also themselves made up of parts. No single part can fully control the organism it belongs to. There are conflicting drives within you, just as there are conflicting drives within the larger society. We are exposed to a spectrum of signals - the interesting question is: How do we come to any decisions regarding a course of action?
The common sense answer is that we make decisions based on the merits of any given situation. Unfortunately, this isn't entirely true. For one, there is neurological evidence that we often act before there is any measurable thought energy in the brain. (in fact, there may be as much as a half second delay between initiating an action and coming up with a reason why you should do it) There are instructions coming to us through a variety of channels, it is impossible to be aware of all of them. Sometimes these instructions have to hit us numerous times, be reinforced by other feedback loops, before they become salient and affect our behavior. Thanks to the Internet, the feedback loop process is getting faster and faster, accelerating change and making the world more reactive than it's ever been.
ack! I just realized that the Art of Memetics is protected against derivatives in its creative-commons license. I've requested permission to continue from Ed. :oops:
Edit to add: He said it was cool!
Also, Hi Ed! :wave: Feel free to chime in if I get it wrong.
Yarr! Permission be had me maties.
I'll give it a proper look later. If you have any questions...
Quote from: fenris23 on September 08, 2010, 11:34:40 PM
Yarr! Permission be had me maties.
I'll give it a proper look later. If you have any questions...
Welcome aboard, though I notice you've been regged for a couple of years.
I like this stuff. A lot.
CHAPTER 3 - Mind/Body/Bricolage (http://artofmemetics.com/memetics/page19.html)
Collage is the art of rearranging and remixing materials available in your environment. In a lot of ways, the body is a collage too, a constantly evolving chain of proteins and fats which form a cohesive structure. Our personalities can also be described as a collage – we remix, rearrange, and re-appropriate the cultural meme pool, creating an identity we use as a vehicle to navigate social spaces. Our persona is eclectically selected from a spectrum of cultural inputs. On this canvas called identity, new memes emerge from these juxtapositions. We pass these things back and forth between us, refining them and remixing them in the face of stress and stimulus.
Our nervous systems are wired for stress. Stress represents a possible threat to survival, and this makes a number of very old psychological systems kick in. Information paired with stress is more memorable. Bonds forged in the face of stress are more intense.
Perhaps the best way to take advantage of stress is to use it to forge new bonds and provoke new evolutionary growth. One might envision a central tribal unit which creates modular income-generating tribes all feeding into the same system. Each of these tribes is an organ in a social body, strengthened by the stress of survival and united by tribal self-interest.
The organs further the needs of both the social body and the individuals within that tribe. This is how our biological wellbeing becomes connected to societal cooperation. Each individual within the tribe serves both the social body and his self-interest. These are the two primary factors informing personal and social behavior. So to understand human behavior, we have to understand both how humans relate within those organs, and how those social organs relate to one another.
Emotions cause physiological changes in the body which in turn predispose the individual towards certain actions. This is the function of modern marketing and advertising, to change your mind in a way which makes it more likely for you to make a purchase.
Money is a very complex signal in our world. It is tied to our survival and is a means to achieve our desires. In the ancient world, people's behaviors were guided by fear of expulsion from the tribe. Now we live in a much more individualistic society, and that pressure has been replaced by a fear of losing one's job or income. This is how money has become connected to old psychological systems geared for survival. There is a lot of stress connected to money, and that means a very strong emotional appeal is necessary to influence how one spends it.
The decision making process isn't strictly rational. It's emotional, conflicted, and tangled. This preconscious decision making space is where memes do their work; They don't affect the world directly, they work by affecting the behavior of human agents. Their theater is the social communication space.
While we are more aware of memes that enter our consciousness through language, our nervous system also picks up memes through association and juxtaposition. We are constantly absorbing information through images, video, and other post-linguistic forms of communication.
The "propaganda of the deed" is of particular interest to us – ways to influence behavior which rely on action, not language. Video and images are very useful in this regard because they are able to juxtapose action and meaning. Historically, if you weren't present at an event, your only way to experience it would be through a verbal retelling or textualization of the event. An event was limited, in this way, in how effective it could be to change people's behavior. Now we are able to film an event, edit it to add certain associations or juxtapositions, and broadcast (and rebroadcast it) it to a large audience. This is how terrorism has become such a hot topic these days -- It's one thing to have heard about Pearl Harbor on the radio, it's another thing entirely to watch the video of the plane crashing into the World Trade Center.
Anything that seeks change has a vector we can chart, a movement we can describe. In order to affect a meme, we have to get close to that vector and apply some force to it. As we've said, meme bearers do not necessarily have to be flesh-and-blood human beings, memetic bodies (networks / egregores) can hold and transmit memes too. These metaphorical beings include its meme bearers and the objects they use to affect the world. This physical extension into space and time gives us a vector we can attack. There are two traditional ways to affect an egregore – (1) to somehow alter or constrain the behaviors of the meme bearers, or (2) to inject an engineered phage into the network.
In biology, phages are viruses which devour the cellular structure, creating copies of themselves in the process.. In memetics, phagic repurposing is the mechanism of altering behavior by imparting coded information tailored to an existing meme.
The internet is particularly useful here, as it allows us to document and examine interactions between people. It also facilitates nonlocal participation, and communication divorced from biological identifiers. Identity, when it relies on self presentation and not biology, can become much more of a collage.
There are numerous non-linguistic ways our brains store information. Iconic memory, for example, consists of logos, landmarks, graphics, and their associated meanings. Technology allows our world to become much more integrated and contain much more associational data than ever before. Semacodes are a technological innovation which illustrates how linguistic information can be transmitted into iconic memory through a juxtaposition method. Semacodes are basically little square stickers which contain a pattern of dots. If scanned by a cell phone camera, they link to a URL. In this way, people can associate real world objects with internet content. If you use semacodes, you will begin to associate certain places with the ideas to which they've been linked. This allows for a greater degree of linking between iconic and linguistic memory, and gives us more opportunities to transmit information into different forms.
Quote from: Cramulus on September 08, 2010, 04:51:55 PM
An egregore is a body capable of transmitting memes across a network. Also known as a mastermind group, it refers to a network's "hivemind".
I thought an egragore was any body of similar people capable of transmitting memes, where a mastermind group was an egragore with a specific mission and trust?
I thought an egragore was originally found in the first edition of Monster Manual II.
Quote from: Placid Dingo on September 12, 2010, 08:50:40 AM
I thought an egragore was any body of similar people capable of transmitting memes, where a mastermind group was an egragore with a specific mission and trust?
I think of an egregore as an organism made of ideas. It's the "spirit" of a group of people. Just like an individual person, it can have information, attitudes, or motivations that it expresses through the people which participate in it.
If you've ever been involved in a group that seems to take on a life of its own, you know what I'm talking about.
here's what the source text has to say:
Quote from: http://artofmemetics.com/memetics/page8.htmlAn egregore is, in a sense, a hive mind generated out of a group and a body capable of transmitting memes across networks. The term egregore can be used in referencing a guiding intelligence within corporations, institutions, and religions that exhibits elements of an individual entity. Concepts like genus loci, or spirit of a place, and the zeitgeist, or spirit of a time period, can also be referenced as an egregore, but for our purposes we are more interested in examining those egregores which arise from mastermind groups and which go on to influence social networks.
I've got more than half of the next chapter written. At some point soon I'll wrap it up and post it.
Quote from: Doktor Alphapance on September 13, 2010, 03:52:42 PM
I thought an egragore was originally found in the first edition of Monster Manual II.
egragore? manticore? what's in a name?
Odd side note: This is one of the first pics you get googling egregore:
http://s2.hubimg.com/u/308301_f260.jpg
Chapter 4: Belief as a Meta-Condition: Paradigm and Brand
http://artofmemetics.com/memetics/page24.html
The most common way that somebody comes to believe something is to experience a buildup of meaning, followed by a catalytic event which triggers a new internal state.
Going back to our idea of "meme space", we can visualize the moment of acquiring a belief as an individual coming into direct contact with that idea in meme space. While this interaction is entirely subjective and personal, it is affected by other social mechanisms.
You can't convince somebody of something by countering what they believe with what you believe. You have to get them to question their position, draw attention to its inherent contradictions or instability. Then you can introduce your idea as a means of resolving that doubt and imbalance.
In psychic kung-fu, the best stance is not to meet your attacker head on, but slightly askew. Start off by understanding the angle they're coming from – understand their world view, the things which motivate them. Try to get inside their headspace, agree with their reality. This will help you detect flaws or contradictions in their beliefs. Ask questions which lead to more questions. When they are confused, their reality is most malleable. This is the best moment to suggest a new course of action, one that is on a slightly different angle than their previous one. Get them to imagine themselves doing what you want and it solving their confusion. Then let them go, moving along a new vector.
Before you can perform any memetics, you have to be in the right stance. Opportunities for yourself and others will appear once you examine your own social network. Diagram it, figure out where your strongest signals are coming from. You can get better feedback for your actions by connecting different nodes or people who influence you. It's possible that you can only accomplish your goals once they are compatible with the motion and ecology of your network. The construction and tuning of feedback loops to achieve the right signal intensity can help solve many individual problems.
In the 60s and 70s, Chaos Magic came into popularity amongst the robe and wizard hat tribe. The central idea, as expressed by Peter Caroll in Liber Null, is that belief is a tool which can be manipulated to achieve certain ends. Instead of aligning themselves with an established tradition, the chaotes' techniques were chosen pragmatically, based on what seemed to actually work. Over time, many of them (including the authors of this book) have drifted away from traditional "magical" practices and into marketing, memetics, and mastermind techniques. They see themselves as part of a great reunification between science and magic, one that uses scientific attitudes and concepts (namely complexity, flexibility, and ecology) to achieve personal goals. In our fast-changing world of nested information systems, influence, attention, and reputation are more useful concepts than cause and effect.
For a signal to be picked up by a node, it needs to be salient. It must have a quality which makes it noticeable, distinct from the signals around it. To make the jump between exposure and infection, the meme must align with the needs and priorities of the host. The host's needs are influenced by other memes present within that network. This leads to "meme clustering", in which a host tends to be infected by groups of similar memes.
When designing a meme, one must ask "What is the emotional reward of incorporating the meme into your behavior set?" Our reactions to things are always oriented around the meaning we've attached to a given situation. Memes work by creating associations between a situation and an emotion. Our likelihood to approach or retreat from a situation is influenced by the emotions associated with it. For example, jokes works on the principle that the person telling the joke receives an emotional reward for doing so. Better jokes lead to better rewards, thereby increasing their chance of survival. Also consider the powerful emotional charge associated with being "right".
A good Brand takes advantage of the collage process of building one's identity. A brand never presents a complete narrative, it engages its target by telling part of a story. A good marketer builds the consumers needs and emotional triggers into the brand's story. When the target participates in the narrative (usually by buying the product), that story becomes built into their identity. Consider the story presented by Nike's slogan, "Just do it". Somebody with the need to "just do it" will have an easier time resonating with Nike's products.
Memetics studies the ways that signals are transmitted and transformed by various networks. The system can be likened to a computer. Human beings, social networks, and communication systems are the hardware, the memes are the software. The structure of the hardware restricts the ways that memes can be transmitted. When a message reaches its target, its emotional associations may predispose the target to act in a certain way, retransmitting the meme. The transmitter receives feedback from the network. Both the transmitter and receiver experience a rush of energy that will influence further output.
A poor use of metaphors is responsible a significant amount of misunderstanding about the world. Our impression of the world is largely based on how we describe it. There are several ways in which our language restricts us. Once we have labeled something, it difficult or at least inconvenient to revise that label. In this way, our language suggests that change is difficult. We are limited by our perceptions of things as being fixed, unchanging over time. Because of this, we need to develop tools which make us aware of our langauge's shortcomings (such as e-prime), and pay special attention to feedback not contained by language.
When we observe change and adaptation in an individual, we call it growth or learning. When we see it in a group, we call it organization or politics. Even these definitions restrict our understanding (and therefore free will) in certain ways.
Social situations also constrain an individual's free will. Timothy Leary sought to understand how a person acts within a social group through a tool called the Interpersonal Circumplex, or personality compass. This tool conceptualizes the relationships between humans within a group along two axises: cooperation-opposition and dominance-submission. In addition to verbal cues, people communicate their position on the circumplex through nonlinguistic signals such as tone and body language. By understanding how each individual relates to each other along these axises, and to the group as a whole, many social situations become quite predictable.
This is totally awesome stuff Cram, except I don't have time to read it right now. :mittens:
that was a really difficult chapter! It's hard to summarize this stuff, as it's already really dense. My "summary" always wants to grow longer than the source text.
The section on Psychic Kung Fu (my term, not theirs) is one of my favorite sections in the book. The suggest the term Irimi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irimi) -- "Irimi involves entering deeply around or behind an attack to defuse or neutralize the attack. The concept of irimi teaches one to blend with or enter into an opponent's attack to become one with the opponent's movement and leaving the opponent with nowhere to strike."
the next chapter will further flesh out our model by introducing the term "metabiological organisms". We'll also take a look at 'the ol' Zeigarnik Effect', one of the most useful tools in a memeticist's bag of tricks.
Integrating this world view into my model of nonlinear time and telepathy+plus gods spirits and thoughtforms living in our emotional systems and networks was great fun.
Like thoughts or actions occurring after "later" effecting what you do and say "prior".
Anyway love the notes.
I finally got around to reading this! WHooooo :D Great stuff Cram!