From: Vincent Campbell (VCampbell@dmu.ac.uk)
Date: Thu 05 Jun 2003 - 10:24:38 GMT
Hi Everyone,
I've been playing a bit of catch up on the list, and I haven't had time to
look at all the posts on this (or any other theme- too many seem to end up
in a bit of name-calling which is disappointing)... ANYWAY, this discussion
about transmissions, and several others on similar themes struck my eye for
a number of reasons.
First, as people on the list will probably know I broadly agree with Wade
here (my agreement stemming back to Derek Gatherer's journal paper a while
back), although I favour a meme as artefact model, rather than a performance
model.
BUT what has struck me about much of these related discussions is the
over-emphasis on the transmitter of information rather than the recipient.
I have recently started reading Pinker's 'The Blank Slate' (I assume most
people will have heard of/read this, but for those who haven't it's
essentially a magisterial refutation of the idea of the human as a tabula
rasa or blank slate who is entirely shaped by society). In one chapter on
the role of culture he reminds us that one of the distinctions of humans
from other species is our theory of mind- or essentially our capacity to
theorise about the motives, intent, feelings etc of other people. It is
this that allows us to infer meaning from actions, and separate intentional
and relevant actions to a particular task from incidental ones. He gives
the example of the difficulty of getting a robot to learn by imitation the
act of unscrewing a bottle cap by watching a human do it, who may, for
example, wipe their brow in the middle of the action, or scratch their head
etc.- how do you teach the robot to concentrate only on those things that
relate to the task? Yet very young children can do this with ease, and even
can complete a task that an adult attempts, and fails at, because they can
infer intent.
In other words the onus should not be solely on the transmitter, but at
least include discussion about the receiver of the meme.
I think, IMHO, that the memesinminds lobby are conflating our innate
abilities for a theory of mind (as well as other things like the capacity
for learning language) as the determinant of memetics. Instead of
recognising that as a level of understanding they see it as the totality of
understanding (which is why Brodie could ask the specious question about
gravity, for him it's the only truth about memetics, as truthful and
self-evident as gravity). IMHO there are other levels of understanding, and
a crucial one, that Wade is right in pointing out, is the question of the
medium through which memes travel from person to person. We can say that
individuals have ideas and thoughts, and we are able to say that people have
theories of other peoples' minds which enable us to glean meaning and intent
from others, but to categorically state that one idea transmits exactly from
one person to another is surely flawed. The answer that it isn't all ideas,
but only memes is an obfuscation because in either case how do they
(whatever "they' may be) get from one person to another?
Joe adds in the point that proximate meanings are transmittable in different
forms, and he's certainly right, as if that weren't true then language would
have no point as it wouldn't convey any consensual meaning between people.
HOWEVER, there's a massive difference between saying that in principle the
spoken and written versions of a sentence can convey essentially the same
meaning, and what happens in practice. A welter of research in
communications studies (including media studies) has shown that even
apparently simple messages -public health advertising for example- can and
are received by individuals in wildly different ways. The intent of the
transmitter can, and often is, lost in the very mediation of the message.
This then leads to several points that need to be taken into account when
considering memes, and their transmission and reception:
- All forms of mediation are open to differential reception because no form
of mediation conveys absolute, fixed meanings
- Reception of mediated messages is highly context sensitive (both in terms
of the individual doing the receiving and the social, physical and temporal
context in which they are receiving the message)
The combination of these two points mean that a third point has to be
considered:
- There can be no perfect replication of a meme from one mind to another,
assuming that the only way it could travel between two minds is in some
mediated form.
How then might one still accomodate the notion of memes within such
assumptions? Well, first we must recognise the importance of Searle's idea
of the construction of social reality (as opposed to the social construction
of reality), in other words those adaptive drives from social conformity and
status that lead most people to comply with the rules and conventions of the
society they're born into. The extent of this is so widespread that it
accomodates a typically high level of consensus of meaning in message
transmission. Second, even allowing for this, one still cannot make
predictions about what might become memes or not, nor can one directly
identify a meme in a mind (because it might look/be very different in the
next mind), all one can do is follow the course of what we can
retrospectively refer to as a meme through its repeated articulaton and
representation in mediated form, which brings us back to the centrality of
artefacts (I won't discount performance here, although increasingly acts of
performance and ritual are experienced in mediated forms, at least in the
developed world, so we're witnessing the TV mediation of the performance of
the Israel/Palestine summit, not the actual performance).
And that's probably enough... for now...
Vincent
> ----------
> From: Wade T. Smith
> Reply To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2003 4:30 PM
> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Subject: transmission
>
> n 1: the act of sending a message; causing a message to be transmitted
> [syn: transmittal, transmitting]
>
> That humans transmit is self-evident. That information is present in
> the messages being transmitted is also not in dispute.
>
> But what _is_ in dispute, and it's not a skeptical position, it's a
> straight up logical and procedural one, is whether or not the
> information being transmitted gets transmitted in toto from one human
> to another, and it is my contention that, since there is no direct
> means of this transfer (i.e. telepathy is not an agent in this
> universe), the information in one mind is, at best, a reasonably
> accurate representation of the information in another's, and the
> maintenance of the accuracy of this representation is the duty of
> culture, as well as a function of a mind in a society of minds.
>
> Thus, I claim, and I see no refute, that saying 'information is being
> passed from one mind to another' is a grossly simplistic way to
> describe the actual events, agents, objectives, participants, media,
> and processes that go into _any_ cultural (indeed, any interpersonal)
> interaction.
>
> And it is a simplicity that dumbs down any further effort to explore
> memetics, if not halt it altogether.
>
> - Wade
>
>
> ===============================================================
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
> Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
> For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
> see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
>
>
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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