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Tim Perper wrote:
The hypothesis of the meme, which is a hybrid between genetics and
Platonism in terminology and concept, needs a good deal more substance
than
it now has. As it is, the notion of a self-replicating,
behavior-inducing
but unchanging meme explains everything and therefore explains nothing.
Isn't this a little overstated? After all you could make the same
argument about genes, couldn't you?
To be sure, fans of such memes can enjoy arguing about them, but such
memes
cannot be used to address concrete problems in history, culture, or
politics. (Be careful how you read what I just said: "such" memes.)
The
reason is that one cannot show that a given historical, cultural, or
political phenomenon is transmitted or induced by such memes, except by
that marvelous form of logic called "truth by assertion."
I suspect that you are throwing down a gauntlet here, much as I have
tried to do, to stimulate thinking. =)
In my own view, memes are simply packages of information that are
circulated in a society. Knowing a piece of information -- a meme --
does
nothing to you. Thus: "To make fried potatoes, take boiled potatoes,
slice them, and fry them until yellow-brown." Has any reader leapt up,
driven like a robot, to perform these instructions? In what precise
sense
is it alleged that "memes" cause or induce behavior? Until that issue
has
been addressed, memetics is silliness -- pure verbalism claiming to be
significant understanding.
My book "Virus of the Mind" is deliberately (and overtly) infected with
language designed to plant memes designed to make the reader leap up
and recommend the book to others. I modeled this phenomenon on my
perceived reason for the success of another book, The Celestine
Prophecy (oops, there go my memes, making me leap up and mention TCP
again!). While it's certainly not a controlled experiment, the sales
curve for Virus has demonstrated consistent word-of mouth sales (i.e.,
unrelated to publicity appearances).
I'm in LA right now hanging out with people who use NLP techniques in
designing direct-mail (DM) pieces (sales letters). Believe me, the
techniques of implanting people with memes that cause them to leap up
and buy are tested extensively in DM. Modern, effective sales letters
are rife with embedded commands, use or misdirection with imagery,
Trojan-horse devices and so on. But this is not memetics per se. When
they learn to make these things self-replicating, as many
personal-growth groups have perhaps stumbled into by accident, then we
will have designer mind viruses that are "technology" stemming directly
from the science of memetics. In my view, it's the self-replication
aspect that makes memetics rise up above semiotics, behavioral
psychology, and so on.
Richard
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