Message-Id: <3.0.1.32.19990506151433.00b038ac@popmail.mcs.net>
Date: Thu, 06 May 1999 15:14:33 -0500
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
From: Aaron Lynch <aaron@mcs.net>
Subject: Re: Society as Extended Memeotype (from: RE: JASSS Critical
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.05.9905061052060.1332-100000@grace.speakeasy.or
At 11:00 AM 5/6/99 -0700, Tim Rhodes wrote:
>
>Taken completely out of context, Aaron Lynch wrote:
>
>> In any case, if the whole thing is
>> really about alliances and loyalties, and the emotions invested in them,
>> then nothing I can say mathematically or scientifically will change that.
>
>Now, what does memetics have to say about the role of "alliances,
loyalties, and
>emotional investment" in the propigation of one set of memes over another?
How
>do we quantify the role social networks play in the replication of memes?
Good question.
Phenomena such as these are why we should not view memetics as a
replacement to all the existing work in fields such as sociology,
psychology, social psychology, political science, etc. Still, in some
cases, we may find that alliances, loyalties, and emotional factors work
much the same for adherents as non-adherents, or for meme A and meme B,
when summed over thousands or millions of people leaving net propagation
mostly up to differences in reproduction rates, evangelism rates, etc. In
other cases, quantitative analysis may need to focus intensely on social
networks as well as recursive propagation parameters. In still other cases,
non-recursive social network effects may predominate.
--Aaron Lynch
http://www.mcs.net/~aaron/thoughtcontagion.html
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