From: Wade T. Smith (wade.t.smith@verizon.net)
Date: Fri 20 Jun 2003 - 23:21:35 GMT
On Thursday, June 19, 2003, at 06:40 PM, Lawry wrote:
> the venue itself contains artifacts that modify or delete or add to
> the substance of the idea being transmitted.
Yes. But also more to the point of offering paths for observation, just
like an exit from a stadium offers the way out, even though anyone
could perhaps scale the wall or use the shipping dock.
> some of these artifacts in the cultural venue are located not just in
> the physical space being shared by transmitter and receiver, but might
> also be lodged in the mind of the receiver and so serve as some sort
> of filter that further distorts the transmitter's idea?
Not precisely. What is in minds are memories and experiences- feelings
attached to things. But, where those feelings originally got attached,
and to what things, happened in a venue, which offered as much
opportunity as it could for those attachments to be made. The venue can
never assume there is anything previously prepared in the minds of the
performer or observer, but every attempt will be made to ensure that
the performers and the observers have had the experiences most
necessary for the influence of the venue. People with years of musical
training for a symphony orchestra- people with gardens for a lecture on
weed control.
> if one changes the elements in the venue then one may change the net
> effect of the transmission?
Yup. There is no separation of _effect_ in the triad of performer,
observer, and venue.
And then Scott wrote-
> Is your "venue" akin to a collective representational social construct?
That sounds representational of my thinking....
> Unlike Pinker I'm not adverse to externalist emphases. That's the
> sociological tradition of Marx, Durkheim et al, but I'm thinking that
> individual psychology does need to be accounted for at some point. For
> you it's whether the locus of memetic research should be at the
> external versus internal level, the external being putatively the
> efficacious aspect, socifacts and artifacts thus winning out over
> mentifacts.
Yes, I think leaving the mental stuff to the cognitive guys makes
sense- I don't think culture came first before cognition, or that
cognition and culture are joined at the hip, but that culture is, well,
an artifact of self-consciousness and creativity and society and the
long human adult development period.
I do see strong, strong, ties to sociobiology however, and, yeah, think
Gould was a bit of a soulist, at heart.
- Wade
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