From: Vincent Campbell (VCampbell@dmu.ac.uk)
Date: Tue 16 Dec 2003 - 13:00:18 GMT
> > I enjoyed this:
> > http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/ioa/arnold/arnoldwebpages/ideavirus.html
>
<V good, though the Arnold-as-meme-projector phenomenon has been
anticipated
> by the theory (and Gladwell's Tipping point makes it clear the Madison Ave
> crowd is already there)....I also saw resaerch recently that shows the
> appeal of OK, Hello et al is that we yearn for role models, and we don't
> have small communities anymore so we access teh global villages' brightest
> stars - more power to Blackwell's thesis .>
>
Indeed, there's a whole set of theories around celebrity worship,
and the popularity of tabloid sex and scandal stories. One author suggested
that the reason people seem so interested in celebrities private lives is
that their breaches of behaviour (drugs, affairs, and what have you) act as
'middle order moral events'- in other words actions that don't have literal
profound social consequences but give people a common event through which to
articulate, discuss and evaluate their own, and wider society's moral
values. Check out Tomlinson's chapter in Lull & Hinerman's interesting 1997
book 'Media Scandals'.
Vincent
> ===============================================================
> 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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