Re: virus: Tim regains his mount

Paul Prestopnik (pjp66259@pegasus.cc.ucf.edu)
Wed, 22 Oct 1997 13:36:31 -0400


> On Mon, 20 Oct 1997, Paul Prestopnik wrote:
>
> > Maybe experiments such as these could be set up to study the travel of
> > memes. Introduce various memes into a group and see how they travel.
> > Granted with non-humans it will be difficult to map things like
evangelism,
> > but this could be a start.
> >
> > what do you think?
>
> Think it's a great idea. I suggested something similar using e-mail
> chainletters a while back. Tracking the meme is the biggest hurtle.
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> -Prof. Tim

well, the idea with e-mail chain letters could be a good one. Tracking
should not be too hard, just make it part of the meme to get back with a
source. What do you think should be the content of the meme, and wait
shall we use to encourage it's spreading?

If we are going to try this, we might as well make the content useful.
Recently there has been mention of trying to give science a good name. We
could maybe write something up with this, encouraging people to write their
congressmen (congresspeople?) saying the support scientific funding. Maybe
give examples of many different scientific funding experiments, and ask the
victims(meme recipients) to choose which ones they agree with and to write
to congress, and to respond to some address at this domain, where we can
tally. Ask them if they would say how many copies they forwarded, if they
received more than one copy, etc...

Or maybe we could spread a meta-meme.

Then we need the viral shell. With the science we can emphasize the
results it will have on their children, prob the same for the meta-meme.
Well what do you think. If we use the metameme idea people may be more
willing to fill out a survey as they will understand better what is going
on..