"Good" Memes

As this blog was initially started to document personal thoughts, I figured I might as well do some of that.

I've been working on adding footnotes and adding an addendum to the journal article I presented a while ago. I've been learning that the academic world is slower than I personally would like it to be, but that's another issue.

Every time I begin to discuss the new advance in memetics that the article discusses on the connectedness of memes in the public consciousness, I am faced by a persistent and annoying question.

Is it good?

Of course, this is a question about the technology.

Is it good that the internet allows us to communicate so much faster?

Is it good for our culture?

Is it good for the quality of information?

I object to the question, of course. This is not uncommon. Much of the time, a question built to commandeer a conversation is objectionable, and this is one of those occasions.

The objection is on two grounds.

The first is that it doesn't make a damn bit of difference. If technology is going to have an impact, it's going to have an impact, and we can't (and shouldn't) sacrifice technology because of it. The advance in technology is not simply good, but necessary.

The second is that it's not really offering an arbitrary criteria for good.

Is good a matter of the beneficiality for us, for human beings, as a species? Or is good a matter of increasing the success of memes?

Of course, it seems obvious to the person asking the question that they were inquiring about the first one, but I make the differentiation intentionally.

As memes develop, as they evolve, they are not at all concerned with us. Dawkins makes a point of that in the Selfish Gene, when the concept was introduced, but it is clear simply through observation. The memes use us when they need to, they destroy us when it suits them better. They operate on their own prerogative (it's not a conscious decision, but rather one dictated by the circumstances under which they evolve; that's not important, though).

If we want the memes to be good in that first sense then we have to make a point of propagating the memes that are beneficial.

Some regard this as a sort of memetic eugenics, like artificial selection. It's not. It's a natural selection. As a medium of replication (and, make no mistake, the human being is a medium of replication), its within our best interest to select in favor of memes that are beneficial. That's a natural function, and part of the role we play as meme machines.

So, as cliche as it sounds, the memes have always been what we make them. The technology changes those memes, but they are still what we make them.

Dan Dennett talks about waging a war on destructive memes, and this is a good idea. Natural selection tends, historically, in favor of memes that advance the survival of their hosts, but that is not always true, and some of the most successful memes are destructive ones.

It is important that we find ways to minimize those destructive memes, maximize the success of the memes most beneficial for us.

This, of course, is the general purpose of my endnote, but it really isn't fair to write an addendum to address a question that I then claim is a stupid one. It also seems a bit nonsensical to answer a question that I think is stupid (though I find that I do it a lot of the time).

Anyway, as this is what my life is coming to, I figure it might be worth writing about.

Youtube and Retroviral Memes

Since I presented a paper last weekend on one of the impacts that the internet has had on memetics that is pretty well exemplified through wikipedia, I thought I’d post something on another impact that the state of the internet has had on the memes themselves, and the way they travel.

The more I deal with youtube, the more I realize how incredible it is as a way of transmitting information. It’s not all, what some would consider, “high quality” information (though, since you can actually get access to clips from popular news and television shows, as well as full length lecture, on youtube, so some of it is), but the memes themselves are incredibly viral.

Because of the way that television and radio transmits, with memes only reproduced every so often (a piece of music on the radio might get one play a day), there is a limit to the amount of replication. Not only is the replication limited by the transmission, but by the lack of control listeners have over content, so they can’t replay the same memes over and over, or select which memes (or group of memes) they’re going to focus on.

As a result, the advent of youtube, which allowed for people to pick and choose which memes they wanted to listen to or watch, and to select all of their own content, offered a whole new way of transmitting memes.

There were viral memes in the age before the internet. We can’t forget that there are certain ideas that have absolutely taken over society purely by way of the television, radio and printing presses. Beatle-mania and Bible-mania were both, certainly, viral.

But it’s unfair to classify what has happened in the internet age in the same way we might classify what happened to earlier cultural phenomena. After all, these memes process and fade much quicker, but they also replicate much faster as a result of the medium.

A lot of this is a result of the user-based content on youtube. The fact that people can post their own content means there are far more memes in circulation. This, as a result, means that the memes which permeate the social membrane, which enter our consciousness and conversation are far more viral, having been forced through a far more competitive process.

Still, what’s interesting is the replicating medium for memes.

The memes themselves replicate at a rate which is more than just viral. Viral memes, historically, take some time to evolve and set in. These memes are far more quick.

I’ve been playing a lot with the connection between the retroviral replicators observed in HIV/AIDS as opposed to the replicators of a typical gene. Because HIV/AIDS is a retrovirus, it’s ability to reproduce and mutate are far faster than the species it is competing with, as well as the immune systems of the creatures it infects, this increased replication and method for increasing mutation is a lot like what youtube offers. Of course, one might argue that it happens without the epidemic, but youtube really is a social virus of epic proportions.

The youtube replicator has drastically increased the speed at which memes travel, and the way in which they are transmitted and mutate.

The case study of Susan Boyle is an interesting one, as her performance on Britain’s Got Talent is a meme that probably would never have gotten to the United States without the retroviral replicator, but, at last count, she has close to forty-five million replications on a single copy of the video.

Anyway, it’s just a thought.

It’s impossible to deny that the internet has drastically shifted the way that memes travel and the way that they replicate, as well as the way that they are linked together (which is what I discussed in my paper last weekend). It’s important that the people who really focus on memetics start to consider the impacts of these changes, because I think they are far more powerful, socially, then that of people knowing about a 42 year old singer. Hopefully I’ll post more about that later.