Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id QAA21376 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 31 Jan 2001 16:05:10 GMT Message-ID: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3101745C23@inchna.stir.ac.uk> From: Vincent Campbell <v.p.campbell@stir.ac.uk> To: "'memetics@mmu.ac.uk'" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Subject: RE: Labels for memes Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2001 16:04:12 -0000 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: text/plain Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
<That's a very simple example of broadcast meme transmission. There
are many
> other ways for memes to be transmitted and few of them involve "encoding"
> as
> single meme for "decoding" by a recipient. In fact, the point of the
> Budweiser commercial is to create brand-fresh memes in the minds of
> viewers
> that associate drinking their brand of beer with a slice of pop culture.
> There is no success unless the meme gets created in customers' minds. This
> is memetic engineering, the conscious salting of minds with deliberate
> self-serving memes. The meme isn't being transmitted from a source mind
> but
> rather created from a fictionalized microdrama with the intention that
> people's minds accept it as peer behavior.>
>
The problem with this is that the idea you're talking about getting
transmitted here, the acceptance of Budweiser consumption as peer behaviour,
with the additional desired goal of getting people to then act this way
themselves, is actually a very complicated message. The anecdotal evidence
thus far suggests that in this case what people are imitating is the wassup
cry, not the peer group lifestyle oriented around drinking Bud. The
audience isn't getting 'it', the ad exec's meme that is. It is not getting
into audience's minds, perhaps because that's not what people are
experiencing, they are experiencing the actual adverts, and adverts, no
matter how apparently simple, contain a welter of information to decode.
There are some good studies, for example, of health information
campaigns with superficially straight-forward messages that completely
mis-fired in terms of the messages that people took from them, e.g.
campaigns around AIDS in the UK in the 1980s (see the work of Jenny
Kitzinger, a summary of which is in Eldridge, Kitzinger & Williams (1997)
'The Mass Media & Power in Modern Britain', Oxford: OUP).
All sorts of processes both external and internal go into audience
decoding of media content, so much so that I just don't see how what
apparently exists in one mind can appear in another mind (let alone millions
of others) in exactly the same form as in the original mind.
Vincent
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