Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id RAA27199 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 24 May 2000 17:27:44 +0100 Message-ID: <20000524162510.19130.qmail@hotmail.com> X-Originating-IP: [62.6.118.12] From: "Paul marsden" <paulsmarsden@hotmail.com> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: this little meme went to market... Date: Wed, 24 May 2000 09:25:10 PDT Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
>If you won't work for a pro-social anti-smoking campaign, who will you work
>for, given that most private corporations are driven by profit motives-
>even when they engage in what is known in the trade as corporate social
>responsibility, the aim is a PR exercise to improve corporate ?>reputation,
>not to be socially responsible. The purposes of advertising and >marketing
>include attitudinal as well as behavioural change so you can't escape the
>intent of trying to change the way people think- and in the pro-social
>context of things like anti-smoking campaigns why should you?
See above reply - journalistic license I'm afraid - probabl trying to save
me from being branded as an evil monster memetically modifying ideas
>There's nothing new in using word association in marketing, it's a basic
>element of focus group work (especially in politics). I'd also be
>interested to know how you posit this exercise as memetic, and thus
> >distinct from other uses of word association?
Some of my published papers on this are available at ideaslab.net (in the
news section - see AdMap paper, with Johan Bollen or MRS Journal paper on
mind viruses). The short answer is that the process is memetic insofar as
the word association game feeds an adaptive hpertext network in which
reinforced associations get stronger and weaker ones die, and this survival
of the fittest competion evolves a "grounded" i.e. inductive network that
describes a social mindscape, the intersubjective meaning of a word or
concept. The advantage of such a tool over collecting individual chains of
associations is that it integrates disparate elements into a summary network
- useful if 300 or so consumers are playing (You can see one of the maps at
and help it evolve by playing the word association game at the site)
Insofar as memetics might be concerned with the structure, as well as the
spread and selection of cultural information, my suggestion is that by
unpacking the dominant chains of associations around a concept you can
represent this structure semantically, a sort of semantic DNA, this might
usefully fall under the heading of memetics. I know this applied stuff is
crude compared to some of the thinking going on in memetics, but
nevertheless, it does provide interesting real-world insight IMO to meaning.
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