Unright

I've been reading Lash's book (Kalle Lash is the founder of Adbusters magazine) and stuff like this is blowing my mind. he has a view that our mental landscape has been and is still currently being ravaged by advertisers setting up shop inside our head as we develop and effectively brainwash us to constant consumerism at the cost of the planet.

Stuff like memes are perfect examples. That slogan or jingle that you can't forget. The political sound bite on the evening news. Everything is reduced to it's shortest possible form (a maxim) in order to be planted into our subconcious like a weed.

Am I the only one disturbed by this?

EDIT: Typo

ARTelevision

No you're not. There has been some extensive discussion on TFP of the hypnotic power of memes, most notably in this thread:

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=911

Thanks for bringing the issue up here, in a political context. I have personally shut down political input regarding the coming elections (I may watch the debates) and will be voting based on my thinking process and not on the pre-digested and bilious pablum we are being fed by both parties these days.

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TheKak

Its kind of scary how it all works. Leads people to do all kinds of crazy things, like indoctrinate children into religion!

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CandleInTheDark

Pretty much any idea that makes it out of a persons brain is a meme. Can you think of an iea that isn't? Why should we be scared that ideas spread?

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KellyC

I think in this case, memes are used to their advantage, they want us to be their "robot," and that is scary.

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Rodney

Most substanceless memes shrivel upon close reflection, like an ice cube in the sun. Problem is, in this day and age people don't spend time examining the ideas that are thrown their way. Things are moving too fast, they've got too much on their mind, and so a catchy meme that appeals to their preconception is adopted and integrated without much thought. I've certainly done it.

Not all memes are shallow harmful; some are good (or at least worthy of consideration), or are ideas waiting for their time. Certain subcultures act as "meme reserves" for old memes that are out of favor now but whose time may come again -- the hippie subculture, the libertarians, old time westerners, the Amish, some of the more radical trade unions, and so on.

Charlatan

The issue isn't that memes exist. The issue is that there are those who uses memes to transfer ideas that are detremental to humanity for the sake of profit. A lot of money is being spent by very powerful corporations to keep you interested in their products...

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ARTelevision

There is also a practical limit to the amount of useless and insignificant information we can be paying attention to at any one moment. As we know, our minds are filled to overflowing with trivialities.

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Charlatan

Sorry... what was that Art? I was talking on my Treo 600 while watching the Olympics (what great ads they have) and surfing the Internet...

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ARTelevision

Well, just that having our heads filled with unconsidered messages that have infected us by viral means results in us having practically no ability to actually think "real" thoughts. Having an endless stream of programmed messages swirling around in one's brain incapacitates the thought process.

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CSflim

Unless of course, said memes are coupled with a meme imploring you not to reflect upon them too closely.

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Rodney

True, like... "and you'd better act now, or it'll be too late!" But after a while -- and after being taken a few times -- most people do learn caution through experience. Not everybody, though -- some never learn, as P.T. Barnum knew well.

Memes are not all-powerful. I simply take the point of view that 97 percent of everything I hear from the general society and media is crap or an outright lie. That doesn't mean that I ignore it; it does mean that I evaluate it before investing any belief in it, according to rules like these:

1) Who's telling me this?
2) What's their agenda? What do they have to gain by convincing me of this?
3) If the opposite were true, would I expect these people to tell me? Or would I expect them to only tell me facts that favor their interests?
4) Do a broad cross-section of voices back this claim?

If the answer to 3 and 4 are false, I ignore the idea for the time being. And they usually _are_ false. Google News (used in conjunction with Google) is an excellent way of scanning a broad range of opinions on any issue quickly, and learning about the people who have those opinions. That's a little work -- but frankly, if I don't feel strongly enough to do some research on some matter, then I don't feel strongly enough to really have an opinion on it.

Charlatan

I've said this before... The only way I see this changing is the with the impementation of Media Literacy in schools. We need to teach reading and interpreting the media as we do reading and interpreting literature.

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ARTelevision

Rodney,
Critical thinking skills are a laudable ideal. However, I do not see evidence that we are actually able to execute them to any significant degree. I see the disorder in my own mind and I see the swirl of nonsense that fills it. I can observe the evidence of the detritus of billions and billions of media-induced messages, cultural programming, early religious indoctrination, paranoid parental admonition, the silly mindsets and vernacular of peers, etc.

I simply do not see evidence that the normative individual is actually able to execute the purgative level of critical thinking skills that would be necessary to eliminate the effects of environmental mental pollutants.

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ARTelevision

Charlatan, that may have some positive effect.
I would take the position, however, that we seriously underestimate the vast persuasive power of multi-million dollar campaigns of highly sophisticated psychological manipulation.

In my estimation, it is unreasonable to imagine that individuals can overcome the monumental psychological and cultural pressure that is enforced by the postmodern media environment.

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apeman

interesting ... but i hypothesize that 95% of the information going into most people's heads gets discarded immediately; i can't see why people should get used to filtering out most of the crap that gets thrown our way

admittedly if you can manage to do that, it tends to lead you into cynicism, which isn't much progress

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roachboy

i am more concerned by the blurring of any distinction between advertising and information, a move that has been a stock in trade of the right.

this website gives an interesting overview of the infrastructure of this kind of business with reference to global warming:

http://www.exxonsecrets.org/


this website tries to take on the matter in broader terms:

http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.pht...e=Disinfopedia

it seems to me that "memes" are elements of a visual rhetoric that would not necessarily be problematic in themselves in a context shaped by clear-ish genre distinctions. in the present context, however, in which there are corporate/political interests working actively to break down these distinctions, the nature and meaning of this rhetoric becomes more complicated and troublesome.

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ubertuber

Art,

I actually wonder how much there would be left in our minds if there were no memes... Can we be sure that consciousness is not a product or function of the interaction of memes? I know that I believe that I am consciously narrowing my focus at times, but in the end I guess Ill never be sure which actions are meme based and which (if any) are truly individualistic. That actually looks scary or depressing now that I've typed it - it had truly never occurred to me that strongly before...

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Charlatan

ubertuber... memes themselves are not the problem...

Memes such as, love your family, work hard and reap the benefits, etc. are not neccessarily bad memes.


Art... I agree that the task seems and probably is insurmountable. Likely it is too late to do much about it. But never say die. In my mind, media literacy leads to an enlightened citizenry that in turn creates legislation to protect themsleves. The children of the Industrial Revolution grew up with black lungs and cities darkened by pollution. They grew up and changed the laws... their great-grandchildren now have (relatively) cleaner lungs and cities.

We, the children of the Information Revolution, must take a stand.

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ARTelevision

ubertuber, as far as I am concerned consciousness is exactly that. We are cultural meme processors - period.

Charlatan, you may be right. I take the positions I do because you may not be right.

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Charlatan

Art... it's all part of the process. Extreme positions will be taken on all sides of the issue. One hopes for a workable medium.

To me, the issue is to not throw our hands in the air and say it's too late.

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Unright

Today I was thinking back to a book I read once "Breakfast of Champions" by Kurt Vonnegut. In it, one of the main character goes insane because of an idea in his head. Vonnegut presented the notion that an idea can be a disease that affects one's thinking. The advertisements in today's culture are so refined in their psychology that it's frightening. As ARTelevision linked in the second post of this thread, subliminal images are not uncommon. The frequency is these ads is even worse. 3-5 minutes of ads for every 20 mins of television watched is a very large amount.

On the other hand, my girlfriend's mom once told me one of the principals behind AA (Alcoholics Anonymous). Certain phrases are used and re-used for a purpose. More often than not a newly-sobered alcoholic doesn't want to listen to anybody. They have to cope with the fact that their old coping method can't help them anymore. The mind is a toolbox and the phrases (ideas) are tools that the alcoholic may not need right away, but are there for when they might need them.

Ubertuber - you wondered if you've ever had any meme-free thoughts? Well, you haven't. Everything we know and react to is based off whatever input we've had in life. Anytime we witness something different than expected, we are forced to process the information and organize it alongside previous inputted information. If it doesn't fit or we are too busy to process it, it will get stored for later consideration.

We world we live in is a contant flux of memes. Television and the internet explodes that flux a thousand times over. I don't believe, as humans, we were ever meant to take in so much information especially at young ages.

ARTelevision

Good and solid down-to-earth contribution, Unright. I'm in agreement with your presentation here. There are indeed some useful memes. They are - like everything else - tools. The fact they are mostly misused says something very significant about us.

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OFKU0

Hmmm,...I'm not qualified to state how memes can or may infiltrate ones mind consciously or subconsciously, but I do know the memes that stick with me are the ones that cause me to relate to them on some emotional level. Usually those are the ones that dictate whether I like them or not that seem to stick.

Of interest thought, and this goes back to some of Arts media mind control. Most of the time I rarely pay attention to ads on t.v. I've seen some ads hundreds of times, can describe to someone the ad but can't remember the product. Currently there is a MacDonalds ad running in Canada that makes me want to throw a brick at the t.v. The reason,..and I'm not a women hater but the woman in that ad bugs me so much I have to change the channel. The ad worked. I remember Macdonald's. Maybe Art or someone else can speak of visual memes that provoke negative and/or positive emotions which have perhaps in essense the same resolve.

EDIT: I should state the reason the woman bugs me is because of how she is eating whatever she is eating not to mention I find her unattractive. (See I don't remeber,..chicken strips maybe) It doesn't matter though, the brand name stuck. Perhaps other people will like her and how she eats,..WIN WIN for MacDonald's. Got you comin' and goin.'

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xepherys

But conscious thought can overcome memes and the evil which they can contain. Frankly, a catchy jingle doesn't make me eat somewhere, a hot woman doesn't make me buy a certain beer and Joe Camel doesn't make me smoke. The ignorant, lemming masses just move along and do what they're told. Break out of that mold and think for yourself. I doubt most of the people reading this forum have that issue, as everyone seems mostly intelligent and even stubborn (which can actually be a very good trait). If the masses want to consume, let them consume. When there is nothing left but us, we'll have the last laugh.

Charlatan

A catchy jingle does not a meme make... A meme is typically a much broader concept. You could call them ideology but that might not be quite right.

A jingle or the ad that contains the jingle, play with memes like love your family or all people are created equal... playing those memes and how they are integrated into our conciousness stir emotions of patriotism, jealousy, envy, pride, etc.

It is these emotional responses (conscious or otherwise) that the ad is trying to evoke.

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Rodney

As for the effect of a surfeit of memes on the young, this can be ameliorated by actually having meaningful conversations with the children on a daily basis. That isn't so easy for some two-earner overbooked parents (which is a hell of a lot of them), but when you're talking about the Invasion of the Memes into Young Minds, you're not just talking about an increased flow of memes from media manipulators, but also a time in which parental guidance and feedback -- meme weeding, in other words -- is weaker and less effective than it has ever been.

SinisterMotives

I've been harping on what I call the Madison Avenue Cult for ten years now. Interesting that this Lash character gets the credit for his "novel" idea.

When we watch television, listen to the radio, read newspapers and magazines, go to the shopping mall, or any one of a hundred other activities, we're voluntarily submitting to this sort of programming. If it really bothers you, eliminate those activities from your life. Notice I said "life" and not "lifestyle." The latter is a meme invented by Madison Avenue to make us feel that our unnecessary consumption somehow amounts to something worthwhile, impressive, or enviable: i.e., that wearing the right clothes, driving the right car, etc., makes us better. Those who try to add "style" to their lives through consumption will never be fulfilled by it. This is the literal meaning of the phrase "get a life."

SinisterMotives

Also, there's a good book from the late 1960s that explores this theme at length, although the concept of memes isn't explicitly mentioned. Check out Where the Wasteland Ends by Theodore Roszak. Preferably at the library, so you won't have to go into one of those pretentious red brick bookstores that clutter the landscape and tempt you into striking a self-important, cappucino-sipping, pseudointellectual pose for the other shoppers.

Unright

The aspect of today's society that scares me the most is the type of memes that are most replicated. Any useful advice that our elders have tried to pass on is drowned out by whatever the new cool fad is. Instead of knowing how to cook and clean a home, we know how to download mp3s and programs for free. Instead of knowing how to identify which plants and insects are beneficial and which are harmful, we know imtimate details of the various casts of Survivor or Road Rules. Instead of having a clear grasp as to how credit cards, bills, loans, mortages, leases, and debt works, we know that tax-free week is in August and where to go for the best sales.

TV and advertising do not have your best interests in mind. They aren't trying to prepare you for the world and they offer no advice or assistance. Unfortunately for today's teenagers, their parents have already grown up watching television, so the amount of useful advice that is passed down is getting smaller and smaller.

Rodney

This has been noted by many even in the boomer generation -- that the domestic skills of their parents (sewing, cooking, home repair, gardening, auto maintenance, woodworking, simple plumbing and electrical work, even laundry) -- were not passed down for whatever reason. This phenomenon is credited for the vast boom in "how to" books on every conceivable subject, and also the many classes on such subject that are available from adult ed classes in most fair-sized school districts. People who didn't learn this stuff when they are young are trying to teach themselves.

You even find it in churches: families (often just the mother and child) in mid-30s showing up at a church, with the parents not even knowing the basics of Christianity, because they never had to go after age 8. But they're in their 30s now and figure that their kid should get exposed to religious ed because that's what parents are supposed to do, but they haven't the faintest idea of what's going on themselves. I've seen it.

If they've got the time, that is. And too often, people who already have kids, don't have the time or energy.

In my own generation (mid-boomer), I'm still trying to figure out why domestic knowledge so often wasn't passed on. I was a minor from the mid-50s til the early '70s. Dad worked 40 hours max, Mom stayed home and made the home most of the time. They took care of everything around the house (and they were competent at it). They weren't really interested in teaching it, though. I had one or two chores that were mainly symbolic (take out the garbage, mow the lawn), maybe the idea that they got from TV sitcoms about what a boy should do around the house).

Yeah, I watched a lot of TV and read. Not much else was asked of me.

SinisterMotives

Excellent points, you guys. When I use words and phrases that were common in the South when I was growing up, people don't know what the hell I'm talking about. I couldn't imagine not being able to cook, clean, and wash my own laundry. And when I go to a new church, the people there assume I don't know diddly about Christianity although I was raised in the Southern Baptist Church and must've read the Bible front to back several times.

CSflim

Actually a catchy jingle was the primary example that Richard Dawkins used when he created the idea of memes.

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Zdragva

What??? your surprised to find out that mankind has been wandering around in a semi dream like state thinking the world is great and to buy pepsi when the truth is the reality of everyday existanze has been carefully eased out of us by traffic jams pop tunes and fast food? pfft, weak guys. Most people know something of the state of what i call 'existance' and thats basiclly everything there is. however most people although they know something. are horrifically afraid of the reality that exists beyond the couch and the 9-5 job and indeed are totally ignorant of the real problems there are. I believe most people think that as long as they do their normal thing then no matter what problems there is the people who lead them will save them, thats the basic belief that even if they die their children will be protected, or a lot dont worry about what happens after their dead really. well here's something for you ppl worrying about the unpaid bills, recent scientific investigations have discovered that the sun seems to be emitting far less of a particular object than it should, the implication is that its possible the core of the sun has gone out, and that supernova could occur at anytime, and not in galactic terms of millions of years, but worst case tomorrow. get ur government to save you then. and thats ONE of a series of mega and not so mega problems we face as a species and if it happens as a person. And you look to statisctics and science textbooks and point out articles on the web that slate this idea of supernova when WE SHOULD BE LOOKING UP TO MAKE SURE I dont want to say we're doomed but what i do want to ask is for the majority of mankind to WAKE UP and become the fearless explorative, never give up homo sapiens that pulled us out of africa and onto every single corner of this entire planet. Open ur eyes to the VAST damage we are doing to the only place we know of ANYWHERE that can support LIFE for gods sake!! i get angry but simply try to understand what my previous sentence actually says. There is a miracle at work that we exist that much is true, whether its a divine miracle or just the longest bet ever paying off, but its a miracle we are here. i mean we EACH actually exist, there is me writing this as a fully alive person with my own ME and there is you reading this, those two objects me and you, are beyond me being able to write about, cop out ending but what can you say about being alive as a human?

ARTelevision

Please work to compose stream-of-consciousness prose into something resembling rational discourse. That's how it's done here.

Otherwise, it appears to be a rant. And that's not how it's done here.

Thanks.

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ARTelevision

Here are some working definitions from various sources regarding the subject of memes. Hopefully, they'll be of some interest to those who, like me, find this notion to be a significant investigative conceptual tool.
..........................................

"What is a meme?"
Glenn Grant: Meme (pron. meem): A contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern. (Term coined by Dawkins, by analogy with "gene".) Individual slogans, catch-phrases, melodies, icons, inventions, and fashions are typical memes. An idea or information pattern is not a meme until it causes someone to replicate it, to repeat it to someone else. All transmitted knowledge is memetic.

Tony Lezard: Richard Dawkins, who coined the word in his book The Selfish Gene defines the meme as simply a unit of intellectual or cultural information that survives long enough to be recognized as such, and which can pass from mind to mind. There's not much of a sense of describing thought processes, but nor is it just a model. As Richard Dawkins writes (this is from memory), "God indeed exists, if only as a pattern in brain structures replicated across the minds of billions of people throughout the world." (Of course the patterns aren't physically identical, but they represent the same thing.)

Richard Dawkins: Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leading from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.
Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, 'belief in life after death' is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of people all over the world.
H. Keith Henson: A meme survives in the world because people pass it on to other people, either vertically to the next generation, or horizontally to our fellows. This process is analogous to the way willow genes cause willow trees to spread them, or perhaps closer to the way cold viruses make us sneeze and spread them.

Peter J. Vajk: It is important to note here that, in contrast to genes, memes are not encoded in any universal code within our brains or in human culture. The meme for vanishing point perspective in two-dimensional art, for example, which first appeared in the sixteenth century, can be encoded and transmitted in German, English or Chinese; it can be described in words, or in algebraic equations, or in line drawings. Nonetheless, in any of these forms, the meme can be transmitted, resulting in a certain recognizable element of realism which appears only in art works executed by artists infected with this meme.

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