From: Robin Wood <robinwood@genesys.co.uk>
To: "'memetics@mmu.ac.uk'" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: let's count them
Date: Fri, 13 Jun 1997 18:45:11 +0100
Yes Bill- there are clearly two levels of observation here- one is
sociocultural and over decades/centuries- the other is how I might
apply this to win some new business from a promising client in a ten
minute conversation. Some more specific language could help us be
clearer about which domain/s we are applying the general principles of
memetics in. (Does anyone have a "list" of some of these principles in
short form?)
Dr Robin L Wood
Genetic Systems Ltd
-----Original Message-----
From: bbenzon@mindspring.com [SMTP:bbenzon@mindspring.com]
Sent: 11 June 1997 02:26
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: let's count them
Robin Wood says:
>While we are at it, the term memes applied to everything from books
to
>words to slogans to fads to worldviews is not helpful- it does not
>make useful distinctions and leads to errors of generalisation and
>mechanistic thinking. May I suggest that we adopt a new vocabulary
>which makes meaningful distinctions and doesn't just lump everything
>into one big bucket?
While a part of me is sympathetic to this, another part of me is
quite
content to put all this things in one bucket. Provided that we then
come up
with meaningfull ways of "weigh" that bucket. I want to count memes.
Or,
think of memes as countable units of cultural information. Then I
want
ways of estimating the number of memes circulating within a community,
or
flowing from one community to another, etc.
For example, a number of anthropologists have been developing scales
of
cultural complexity. Those scales yield ordinal values, but not
cardinal
values. Thus, if culture A has a complexity score of 20 and culture B
has
a complexity score of 40, one can assert that culture B is more
complex
than A, but it is not twice as complex. If we had a complexity scale
which
had cardinal values, we could make the stronger assertion. Better
yet, we
could take communities in a given region, estimate cultural complexity
over
some period of time, and graph the results. What sorts of
developmental
curves would we get?
There interesting thing about Dawkin's little exercise in the "new
edition"
of "The Selfish Gene" is that the growth of citations for the papers
he
tracked was exponential, while citations to other papers did not
exhibit
exponential growth. What does that tell us about the underlying
dynamics
of those two memetic streams?
William L. Benzon 201.217.1010
708 Jersey Ave. Apt. 2A bbenzon@mindspring.com
Jersey City, NJ 07302 USA http://www.newsavanna.com/wlb/
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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