From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Thu 05 Jun 2003 - 18:36:46 GMT
From: Vincent Campbell <VCampbell@dmu.ac.uk>
To: "'memetics@mmu.ac.uk'"
<memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: transmission (and reception)
Date sent: Thu, 5 Jun 2003 11:24:38 +0100
Send reply to: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> 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.
>
This is a salient point. Transmitters perform actions that are
perceiveable; receivers perceive these actions. Clearly the actions are
happening between, but, although what is being perceived is between,
the perception itself is an internal and cognitive process, happening
within.
>
> 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.
>
I can also transmit the same message using different words, or a
different word order, which alters the performance, and requires
cognitive parsing to recover the selfsame meaning (I can do that, that I
can do, do that I can).
>
> 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.
>
And, while similar, the cognitive gestalts are themselves not identical,
so even if a precisely identical meme was communicated, it would be
assimilated by and accommodate to the similar yet different cognitive
environments in similar yet differing ways.
>
> 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
>
===============================================================
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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