From: Dace (edace@earthlink.net)
Date: Thu 27 Nov 2003 - 04:09:37 GMT
There's a new meme in Washington. Seems that Bush came to town wearing a
blue tie. No one in Washington had ever worn a blue tie or could remember
seeing anyone else in a blue tie. Up till then, there had been only three
to choose from: the red "power" tie, the striped "Harvard" tie, and the
"bureaucrat" gold (at least according to Roger Mudd, who reported this story
on the Lehrer Newshour). Pretty soon, the cabinet caught on, starting with
personal advisor Karl Rove, the last holdout being Colin Powell (and his CIA
man, Tenet). Beyond the White House they've started popping up all over
town.
Clearly, it's a meme. The question is when it became a meme, i.e., when did
it cease to depend on human sense for its replication? Certainly when Bush
began wearing it, it was not a meme. After all, he was the only one doing
it, and to be a meme it must spread to at least one other person. But that
doesn't mean it automatically became a meme when Rove picked it up. As long
as people wore it for the perfectly sensible reason of getting on W.'s good
side, it transmitted through normal cultural means rather than memetically.
Only when people genuinely started to like it did it became a meme.
Suddenly, it was "happening," and instead of choosing the tie, the tie began
choosing them. I'd say when the Queen showed up for her date with Bush (who
was wearing a white tuxedo) sporting a blue sash, we can pretty well figure
it's gone memetic. It had become a "thing," and naturally (as with the
Beatles 40 years ago) she wanted in on it.
Of course, I don't mean literally that the tie itself is the meme. A meme
is not a thing you put under a microscope. The meme is the behavior of
wearing the tie, and no, it's not tucked away somewhere in our prefrontal
lobes. No matter how many people are infected with the meme, it's still one
meme. So it doesn't exist in individual minds, i.e. brains. It exists in
the shared mind of a living culture.
Ted
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