From: Van oost Kenneth (kennethvanoost@belgacom.net)
Date: Sat 19 Jun 2004 - 15:15:04 GMT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Keith Henson" <hkhenson@rogers.com>
> At 09:49 AM 18/06/04 -0500, Gene Doty wrote:
> >Keith Henson wrote:
> >>At 01:40 PM 17/06/04 +1000, you wrote:
> >>But I wasn't clear about what I was trying to ask. Has anyone used
> >>"meme" on the consumers? As in "buy our memes!" or "Joe Blow has the
> >>better meme set, vote for him as dog catcher!" So far I can't think of
> >>an example.
> >>Keith Henson
> >Perhaps this isn't quite what you're asking, but it's probably
> >connected--in a recent novel (_The_Face_), Dean Koontz makes passing
> >reference to memes and memetics. Koontz is "selling" the consumer a chill
> >at the perfidy of intellectuals, however:
> >
> > "Even Ms. Dowd, his English and reading tutor, didn't expect him
> > to _enjoy_ books; she doubted they were good for him. She said books
were
> > relics; the future would be shaped by images, not by words. In fact, she
> > believed in "memes," which she pronounced _meems_ and defined as ideas
> > that arose sponaneously among "informed people" and spread mind-to-mind
> > among the populace, like a mental virus, creating "new ways of
thinking."
> >
> >I don't know if the inaccuracy of this definition reflects Koontz's
> >understanding. I suspect it does. "Ms. Dowd" is one of several unpleasant
> >(and malicious) "intellectuals" in this novel. Koonz certainly replicates
> >an "intellectuals are dangerous" meme.
>
> It's not a bad statement about memes (with a paranoid slant) for showing
up
> in a work of fiction and spoken by a villain
Hi Gene, Keith and all others,
Yes, traffic has been low, not in the least I thought I was the only one
left to check everybody the list....
But to give some comment,
The only time I came across the word ' meme' outside the main
stream of those interested in them was in a magazine about art,
more specifically in an article about art- critique.
" If the idea about ' art in crisis ' didn 't have such a low number
of hits on the Web ( 92 Google- points) we could talk about it
as being a meme." ( Translation)
The writer of the article is upset that others don 't see that the
world of art(s) is in crisis, and moreover that the critique about
and over art is even more. She talks further about that the
critique is part of being a populistic- scheme of those who
wants to bring art ( back) to the streets.
Art, in the writers her point of view, stands above the common
cultural critique and is and should be just the crowbar to have
critique in the first place about what happens in the cultural dis-
course of today.
Regards,
Kenneth
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