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.

Find Compassion

There has been something sitting at the back of my mind, softly prodding all month as I speak to people, talk about things that are not important. So much of my life, whether I spend it blogging about things that may or may not reshape the world or even about little musings that make me feel a whole universe broad.

The truth is, I spend a great deal of my time angry, I spend a great deal of my time voicing outrage, speaking out to ridicule people with whom I don't agree. It doesn't bother me. In fact, I find a great deal of joy in voicing those opinions, but that's not what's been nagging me.

I hear people talk all of the time about unconditional love, as if it were the most elegant phenomenon they had ever come to understand. I don't agree with that assessment.

Do not look for love in everything, do not soften yourself to the world perpetually. Show it love when love is what it needs, but when there is something that you see as wrong, do not hesitate to wave a finger at it and shriek at the top of your lungs. Create satyr, voice distaste, and then, from time to time, find compassion.

Do not love unconditionally. There are plenty of things in the world worth hating. Hate poverty. Hate starvation. Hate disease. Ridicule irrationality and speak out against the people who propagate it.

At the end of all of that, find compassion for those who suffer as a result. Allow those emotions to be directed properly and to subside. I, from time to time, ridicule Creationists and people who believe in faith healing and all of these other things. Above all, though, I feel compassion for those people, because they suffer for their errors.

I feel compassion for homophobes who will never recognize the legitimacy and the elegance of those relationships. I feel compassion for the racists who will never understand genetics because they insist on differentiating between people.

Do not love unconditionally. Do not feel guilty about hate. Just find compassion.

In the Future

The more I have conversations with my friends about dead people, the great men and women of previous generations, the more I realize that we have a skewed view of ancestors, that we see them as iconic, and while there might be something to that, it creates a pretty unrealistic worldview.

I mean, the average high school graduate knows more about the way the world works than Aristotle. There are many great things that Aristotle said and did, but if he were alive today, talking about the theories presented in Politics, or in Physics or Metaphysics, he would be laughed out of a general education course.

No one accepts Aristotle's political morals anymore, and the modern ethicists (guys like Peter Singer) are so far beyond that it's incredible. Aristotle was a brilliant man, idolized by many, but why? Because he was at the peak of innovation, seems like the obvious reason, but that leads us to totally jump past his shortcomings.

Sitting in a seminar at Saint John's College, touring, I remember listening to students talk about Aristotle's Politics, the section on slavery. I was so sure I wanted to go to Saint John's that I was literally telling complete strangers where I was going to college next year (I had already been accepted, and was looking for a way to pay for it), but watching these students jump through hoops to make Aristotle seem like a modern ethicist was just ridiculous.

There were a lot of reasons why I decided not to go to Saint John's, or at least a lot of reasons I rationalized that decision, but this is one of the biggest.

Every classic has some value to it. Every great book has something to offer, whether fiction or nonfiction, ancient or modern. That doesn't mean it is a revelation from cover to cover. That doesn't make the author, or his philosophy, immaculate.

I like Dave Matthews' song "Where are You Going." I think it's a fantastic song with a great sound and beautiful imagery. Does that mean everything he's written is fantastic? No. I think most of his music is, but I acknowledge the songs that fall short, the couplets that don't quite work.

This isn't a stretch because we don't treat our musicians like messiahs, we don't treat them like prophets who's work is eternal, all transcending. This is how some people treat Aristotle. They love Ethics, and so they apologize for the failures of Politics. This is a mistake, and it's the same one that religious fundamentalists make.

Find the beauty in the context. Find the elegance in the time and place in which the theory was fabricated, but don't expect perfect, all consuming wisdom from individuals long gone. They were, after all, only people.

Happiness: Making It

I've downloaded a video on Daniel Gilbert from the TED Podcast, but you guys can watch it on youtube if you want.

The part that stimulates me the most is this notion of synthesized happiness, not simply on the nature of synthetic happiness, its incompatibility with choice.

We have a remarkable capacity to cope, something I always felt Seneca underestimated. We have an evolutionary need to aim high, to set goals we cannot reach so that we can at least go somewhere when we work towards them.

Whether we reach goals or not, it's nice to have them. Going forward is better than sitting around smoking a joint (though you can be happy that way too).

People ask how I motivate myself to do things, mostly when atheism comes up, and I tell them it's not because I want to make myself happy. Not that I don't like being happy, but because I already am happy and, as Gilbert points out, I could be just as happy not working as I am working.

I do it because I want to push myself and the world around me. There is something to be said for pushing the limits of human thought, and though I am not delusional enough to believe I'm at the forefront of that, joining in and doing what I can is important.

Dan Dennett talks about his soundbite for finding significance and purpose in life: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.

So find purpose. Happiness, synthetic or otherwise (I'm not a huge fan of the differentiation), will show up on its own time.

Boredom: An Ethical Quagmire

Boredom is, I think, the most common affliction among modern students. School is boring, homework is boring, and so on. Rarely do we find something inspiring and, as a result, rarely are we happy.

There are some great stories about the problem of stagnation and while I don't believe that it's ever possible to really come to a complete stop, but I know that some moments are more inspiring than others, and I know that we can't always be filled up, or change the course of history like the March on Washington.

The real problem, though, is how do I address boredom?

There are people who tell you that you have to work. You just do. Why? Because you do.

There are reasons to get good grades and reasons to make money, which justifies the boredom in some degree, but can't the boredom be removed? Can't we be productive and happy? Or is what Twain had to say in Pudd'n'head Wilson pretty much right, that we have to do what we'd rather not.

I have always stood firm behind the belief that if something is boring you, then you should look for a way to make it interesting, or question whether or not it is really important for you to be doing it at all. Sometimes the conclusions will get you into trouble. My dad, of course, has never been happy when I've decided that homework is often a waste of time.

The point, though, is not to replace boredom with nothing. Don't fill the void with T.V. for the sake of T.V. (it can be great if you're watching something you care about). Don't use this as an excuse to escape work because you're lazy. This is really where it devolves to the honor system.

Do something that is going to make you think. Watch something that is going to make you think about anything. Download a TED talk that looks interesting or surf youtube looking for videos that expand your brain (whether it's your musical taste or your understanding of science). Link your way through wikipedia articles on physics or history.

Sam Harris talks about changing your moment-to-moment perception of the universe, and that's what we should be shooting for.

If you're bored, like I am, try to fundamentally change the way you think about everything. Trust me, it's a lot of fun.

The Un-Wisdom of Hindsight

In the first chapter of Richard Dawkins' "The Ancestor's Tale," he talks about the unwisdom of hindsight, the mistake that we can make by looking backwards at the evolution of species.

Dawkins is one of my favorite evolutionary scientists, partly because he's a good writer, but mostly because he makes it easy for me, a highschool student hanging around a 3.0 gpa (and a humanities person), to understand.

To paraphrase what Dawkins writes, when we look backwards it's easy to make the mistake that we are the final step, that we are the ultimate and the finale.

Dawkins wants, above all else, to make clear that we, the human species homo sapiens sapiens, are not the final step in the evolution of species. As we find out every day, we aren't the ultimate answer to everything (life's more fun not living in Pleasantville anyway).

When I write about the individual evolution (how the course of events throughout our lives impacts who we are) it's easy to spend most of my time looking backwards. The past offers the most concrete examples, because I can point to things that happened to me or people I know or things I've read and say "Hey, that is the cause of this, which caused this" and then explain the inevitable domino effect that leads up to the Now.

It is important to remember, though, that everything that has happened to us is not definite, is not final. Who we are is not the final answer. A species, like an individual, evolves for a long time, constantly changing through the generations until it dies. We live like that moment to moment.

The unwisdom of hindsight is something that is important, because it's not something that we can allow ourselves to get tied up in. It's really easy to trip over things, and it's much easier and when we spend our time looking backwards. Reflection is good, it's healthy. It helps us to glean the significance of some moments. Like anything, though, it's best in small quantities, because there are times when we need to look forward, so that we can plan ahead, and there are times we need to look at our own feet, so we don't trip.

Sometimes, we can learn as much from looking forward as we can from looking back.

Ideas and Where They Come From

Ideas all come from some place. They are effects of events that have happened in our lives. That is one of the fundamental principles that I'm trying to explain.

Thich Nhat Hahn writes in "Being Peace" about how things are made up of non-things, that is to say that each tree is made up of bark, sap and leaves (superficially, not even beginning to dive into the molecular complications of something like that).

Ideas come from things that are not, at least initially, even parts of the idea (just like the way trees draw in carbon from the air). These things start as experiences that are eventually expressed through "I," the individual.

When you think something, or say something or write something down, you might not always think about where the ideas come from. I definitely don't think actively about everything that leads me to come to conclusions. That's difficult and takes alot of time, and by the time I've done it, I might have forgotten what I was going to say or write in the first place. I just want to recognize that things come from places besides me first, that I am not really creating anything, just changing it and linking it together, synthesizing it, in a sense.

Think about it like this: How do you get 7?

3 + 4 = 7

7 is made up of 3 and 4, which, as Thich Nhat Hahn said, are non-7 elements, but these things start to get really complicated when you think that 7 isn't just limited to 3 and 4.

2 + 5 = 7

1 + 6 = 7

Okay, but what about when we don't just think about it in terms of synthesizing 2 experiences?

1 + 2 + 3 +1 = 7

2 + 2 + 2 + 1 = 7

3 + 3 + 1 = 7

What if we don't just limit ourselves by thinking about it in terms of addition?

2 x 3 + 1 = 7

4 x 2 - 1 = 7

49 / 7 = 7

24 / 6 + 3 = 7

There are an infinite number of ways to get to 7, because there are an infinite number of places to start and there are a great deal of operations that we can use to change those numbers to get them to 7.

Like I said, it's pretty easy for me to forget what an idea was once I start considering where it came from.

What if, though, we think of ourselves like an idea?

I have said before that we are evolving beings, constantly changing as a result of our moment to moment experiments. What I mean is that where we started is undefinable now (because that first figure existed long before we were born), and operations continue to change it, so, like an idea, we are pushed through a series of operations to change who we are.

7 is a relatively simple idea, but as an individual it seems ridiculous to use something as simple as 7 as a metaphor for who we are, right?

Even a 5 or 6 digit number like 90,790 (my birthday, just as an example) seems like an indequate example. It seems like it would have to be something like pi to 50 places. That's fine, we are complex organisms and to use a base 10 system to explain our existence is probably inadequate anyway.

That seemed like a tangent to me, but I hope it was helpful anyway. I just wanted to offer you chance to see how our ideas (as simple as 7 and as complicated as an emotion like anger or disdain or pleasure) come from our experiences, but I think it's important that we come from those experiences too, that we are a product of things that happen to us and our experiences are an expression of that.

Hope that was helpful for getting a little handle on the idea I've been throwing around (for lack of a more wild verb) in the last few posts).