Re: Meme definition (was: birthdays)

From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Thu 19 Jun 2003 - 18:10:05 GMT

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    Date sent: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 10:23:25 -0400 Subject: Re: Meme definition (was: birthdays) From: "Wade T. Smith" <wade.t.smith@verizon.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Send reply to: memetics@mmu.ac.uk

    >
    > On Thursday, June 19, 2003, at 09:27 AM, memetics-digest wrote:
    >
    > > But if you restrict your 'model' to fishes and wishes
    >
    > Ah, no, I am not restricting my model to fishes and wishes, or even to
    > fishes with wishes, I am acknowledging that the venue does not need to
    > include the performer or his mind at all- after all, where are you and
    > what are you doing when you watch Finding Nemo?
    >
    > You are in a movie theatre (venue) watching (being an observer of) a
    > movie (a special case of performance, specifically, an animated film).
    >
    The artifact film is brainless, but not the minds who created it, and not the observers, if anything is passed on (otherwise, you could quiz your chair about the previous showing).
    >
    > > Unless there are multiple minds with different memes (not just
    > > facts) in them, there is nothing that their interaction can
    > > replicate, regardless of external environment or venue, or even any
    > > way that they can meaningfully interact at all.
    >
    > And, guess what?, it _is_ meaningfully interacting with you, and,
    > guess what, there ain't another mind in the place. Oh, you say there
    > is.... gee, they are all in that artifact? Pixar thanks you.... So,
    > you can't say 'regardless of external venue', can you?
    >
    > In point of fact, an animated movie is so precise an example of a
    > venue that I'm shocked I haven't used it before....
    >
    A movie is an artifact that has been intentionally stuffed, by its human creators, chock full of visual and auditory stimulu, any of which encode memes. Text was the first innovation that allowed transposition of memes so that the transmitter and the recipient need only share the mediating commonality of the first having written and the second having at some point subsequently read it, rather than spatiotemporal contiguity. Television, movies/DVD's/VHS (visual + auditory) and CD's/albums/tapes (auditory) are subsequent unidirectional (from tranmitter to recipient) spatiotemporality-independent innovations; computers (visual, some auditory) and telephones (auditory) enable spatially distal interaction, with email lists expanding that to spatiotemporally distal. The only restriction that can be universally listed for all these media is that the receiving must be posterior to the transmission.
    >
    > - Wade
    >
    >
    > ===============================================================
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    >

    =============================================================== 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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