Hyperpolitics and Memetics

Mark Pesce at the Personal Democracy Forum (June 2008), emphasises how "hyperconnectivity" through the Internet and other digital communication mechanisms today enables the distribution of ideas across a large group of individuals in a short span of time. He emphasises how the use of digital media (Facebook, Flickr, etc) allows the spread of ideas; according to him, "... whenever any one of us displays a new behavior in a hyperconnected context, that behavior is inherently transparent, visible and observed. If that behavior is successful, it is immediately copied by those who witnessed the behavior, then copied by those who witness that behavior, and those who witnessed that behavior, and so on. Very quickly, that behavior becomes part of the global behavioral kit. As its first-order emergent quality, hyperconnectivity produces ... unprecedented acceleration of the natural processes of observational learning, where each behavioral innovation is distributed globally and instantaneously" -- thereby leading to Hypermemisis. A very interesting article that discusses how children of Generation Next are becoming experts in mimesis -- the learning by immitation. He suggests that, "we are built to observe and reproduce the behaviors of our parents, our mentors and our peers. Our peers now number three and a half billion." An interesting and related idea has been propagating across the Internet for a while -- that of Memetics. According to the Wikipedia entry, "Memetics is a neo-Darwinian approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme. Starting from a metaphor used in the writings of Richard Dawkins, it has since turned into a new area of study, one that looks at the self-replicating units of culture. It has been proposed that just as memes are analogous to genes, memetics is analogous to genetics." Memetics therefore represents those ideas that have managed to survive and be passed on through the "minds" of individuals. A meme being either a unit of cultural information that can be copied, or an observable cultural artifact and behaviour -- describes those theories that dominate our thinking today. Perhaps, a more controversial question one can ask today is whether the Climate of Fear imposed through rising oil prices, climate change etc, is essentially a meme propagated by news media. A "cultural artifact" that has been picked up and replicated upteen times until it has become acceptable "reality". Surely, the Internet provides the best medium for propagating memes to the masses -- like dominant genes that exist within our population.