From: Lawrence DeBivort (debivort@umd5.umd.edu)
Date: Fri 20 Jun 2003 - 23:56:35 GMT
Wade, are you thinking of the venue as something that someone arranges
deliberately in order to influence the transmission of an idea?
I understand you to say that the venue is different from the mind of the
recipient, though what is in that mind may earlier have been influenced by
other venues.
I will be out of touch for a few days, and look forward to catching up when
I get back.
Good discussion: thanks to all.
Cheers,
Lawry
> -----Original Message-----
> From: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk [mailto:fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk]On Behalf
> Of Wade T. Smith
> Sent: Fri, June 20, 2003 7:22 PM
> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Subject: Re: venue examples
>
>
>
> 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
>
>
> ===============================================================
> 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 archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat 21 Jun 2003 - 00:01:23 GMT