Re: UKNM: Memes and marketing

[Ozlem Tuncil]

At 07:08 03/04/00 -0700,

uk-netmarketingchinwag [dot] com

 wrote:

>Apropos of nothing going on in discussions to date:

>

>Has anybody come across memetic theory, wherein the

>argument is posited that ideas, like genes have an

>inherent 'desire' to propogate and replicate, and

>peoples minds are fundamentally meme incubators.



Memes will blow (up) your mind!


The memes concept has been taken up by several Internet "gurus" to predict

minds and super-minds on the Internet. In his essay "Of Man, Mind and

Machine," Joshua Lateiner writes, "If one accepts a materialist, meme-based

theory of mind, one will be forced to consider the potential for minds to

exist in media other than the human brain".


Robotics expert Hans Moravec imagines a future world in which there are

human minds and computer programs living together in cyberspace and that

they "make their living in something of a free market way, trading the

products of their labor for the essentials of life - in this world memory

space and computing cycles....the immensities of cyberspace will be teeming

with very unhuman disembodied superminds, engaged in affairs of the future

that are to human concerns as ours are to those of bacteria".


Francis Heylighen has a different view of how the global mind will develop

in his 1996 essays "Evolution of Memes on the Network: from chain-letters to

the global brain" and "From World-Wide Web to Super-Brain". He concludes,

"The end result is likely to be the emergence of a globally shared ideology,

or 'world culture', transcending the old geographical, political and

religious boundaries". The whole of humanity would support this global

ideology and individuals would be like the cells in a multicellular

organism.


But don't despair! A rejoinder from Richard Barbrook's essay "Never Mind the

Cyberbollocks":


"The meme theory is yet another attack on human subjectivity. Our complex

social development is first simplified into technological progress, then

reduced to culture, and finally explained away through the biology of memes.

Our creativity and imagination as humans is once again denied. Translated

from bio-babble, meme is simply another word for the all-powerful idea,

ideology or sign. It is the Platonic deity reborn. Yet again, we're supposed

to believe that we're simply empty vessels manipulated by mysterious outside

powers".



Ozlem


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