Securing the Noosphere

Russian Facebook ads featured anti-immigrant messages, puppies, women with rifles
Oct 2017, Ars Technica

The study of memetics as the spreading of information, and articles about the science of psychological influence of narratives as studied by DARPA, are just some of the posts that have come up here on Network Address. (See the Post Script below.)

Many years prior two us seeing something like this happen (Russian Facebook election interference), something which is very easily understood by a lot of people, and the threat of which is also very easily understood by a lot of people. Totally not into scaremongering, but definitely into the study of memetics and how it works. As we can see now, it is a very important topic.

It should be noted here that the contagion theory of memetics propogation has been deflated as of late. It's just too simple. There's lots of work being done on what makes a thing viral, and it gets less and less to do with infectious disease theory. Something about affect and timing and network distribution.

Regardless, the infectious disease model was never the one used for memetics. By its very name in fact, memes were thought to behave as genes (and were thus named by Richard Dawkins in his 1982 book, The Extended Phenotype). The 90's saw some other folks pick up the idea and write some books, but by the eearly 2000's it was dead. Leading up to 2010, it became a sort-of underground thing, thanks to the ease of creation and transmission of the macro image series (this is, perhaps, the formal name for this instantiation of a meme). The meme - the new meme, not so much as Dawkins described it, but as a macro image series specifically - seems to have thoroughly saturated mainstream culture, as evidences by the fact that your mom probably makes them and shares them with her friends. Or in other words, memes are mainstream because Russian digital soldiers are making them and sharing them with scared, synapse-deficient Americans.

Anyway, hopefully the meme is getting its due recogntion, and hopefully it can be seen not just as a funny picture, but the unit of cultural transmission that it was intended to represent.

image source


Post Script
Recombinant Memetics and Narrative Networks
Network Address, 2013
No surprise, DARPA's been doing research on narratives for quite some time now; how else to explain the process of inculturation perpetrated on susceptible patriots by terrorists?

The Inward Turn of the Narrative
Network Address, 2012
1970's book by German scholar Erich Kahler, whose view of the modern world is “the steady evolution of consciousness in the direction of the demythification and secularization of wider and wider areas of human life”. Good read on cultural complexification

The Meme Wars Instruction Manual May Be Written By Robots
Network Address, 2013

Thought Contagion
Network Address, 2012
Summary of a book about how belief spreads through society (the new science of memes)
Aaron Lynch, 1996

And this one is just for fun, and for the art history folk out there:
The Macro Image Series and the Dematerialization of Artifact
Network Address, 2013