Meme infographics

There are quite a few meme-related "infographics" out there. Here's a few of them:

• What's in a meme
• The Selfish Internet Meme
• Memories - three decades of the way we were
• Online schools guide to memes
• Meme-ories: The top Internet memes of 2011
• Best memes of 2010
• Teh Internets
• Memes for marketing: good, good

The role of reciprocity

It's recently come to my attention that there seems to be some confusion about the role of reciprocity in human society. To illustrate, here's Peter Turchin:

Unfortunately, the reciprocal altruism breakthrough turned out to be illusory in the larger quest for the understanding of why humans are such a cooperative species. The problem is that it really works best for tiny groups of two, or very few people. Once the group becomes larger than 5–10, reciprocal altruism starts to break down, and it is certainly not the answer for lasting cooperation for any realistic group sizes, even in small-scale human societies (hundreds, or a few thousands of individuals).

...and here's Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd (2005) in Not By Genes Alone:

Despite its many problems, theoretical work does make one fairly clear prediction that is revevant here: reciprocity can support cooperation in small groups, but not in larger ones. [...] Theoretical work suggests that this phenomenon will limit reciprocity to quite small groups, and while no good empirical data exist, it does fit with everyday experience. [...] We eventually stop inviting friends over to dinner if they never return our invitations; we become annoyed at our spouse if she does not take her turn watching the children; and we change auto mechanics if they repeatedly overcharge for repairs. But cooperation in larger groups cannot be based on the same principle.

Both then use this "failure" of reciprocity to move on to hypotheses relating to group selection.

A prominent supporting paper for the idea that reciprocity only works in small groups appears to be a 1988 Richerson and Boyd paper - titled: "The evolution of reciprocity in sizable groups".

The conclusion of that paper says:

Reciprocity is likely to evolve only when reciprocating groups are quite small.

The paper models cooperation within large groups by repeatedly sampling n individuals from the group and using an n-person Prisoner’s dilemma. However, that just doesn’t match up with how reciprocity actually works in large groups. Most reciprocal relationships – as the very word “reciprocal” might imply – involve two parties. That is the case where everyone seems to agree that reciprocity works. However, on the level of the individual, each person has a Dunbar’s number's worth of reciprocal relationships – throughout their social network. Then the cooperative network of each individual partly overlaps with the cooperative network of every other individual, creating cooperation that permeates the whole group.

The enlarged human brain allows more relationships to be tracked - and thus a larger reciprocative network to be maintained - than is possible for most other creatures.

Of course, reciprocity doesn't explain all cooperation between members of a group - but it is highly relevant to most within-group interactions. People don't engage in very many interactions with random group members and instead spend most of their time interacting within their social circles. There, they have one-to-one relationships, can remember the names and faces of people, can track their interaction history. It is under just these kinds of circumstances that reciprocity actually works.

So, reciprocity can - and does - help to establish cooperation within huge groups, provided that there are smaller networks within those groups - which, of course, there usually are. Reciprocity applies to cooperation within governments, companies, charities and other large-scale human organisations.

Reciprocity is a big and important pro-social force for humans - but it isn't all important. There are a range of other forces that also act to establish cooperation between humans in large groups - perhaps most notably virtue signalling.

Cultural epidemiology criticised

A recent article in The Economist criticises approaches to cultural evolution based on epidemiology.

The article is called: Social contagion - Conflicting ideas The article boils down to saying that disease organisms are bad, and that people want to avoid them - whereas many ideas are good - so people want to acquire them. On that basis it apparently advocates ditching models based on epidemiology.

The article concludes with:

But it suggests that ideas are sufficiently different from diseases that it might not be wise naively to apply models designed for one to probe the other. High time, then, for social psychologists to stop piggybacking on epidemiologists and work harder on their own models.

My assessment is that we need generalised epidemiology - or infodemiology - that deals with both deleterious and beneficial interactions with cultural symbionts. A generalised epidemiology is needed in both the organic and cultural realms - since both feature parasitism and mutualism.

The article's suggestion - that we should ditch epidemiological models and start again from scratch is misguided. It violates the basic principle of building on what you already have. Switching from parasitism to mutualism in basic models of contagion is just a case of switching a sign around. It is true that adaptations for avoiding symbiotes can look a bit different from adaptations for acquiring them - but that does not entail discarding all our existing models, terminology and framework. We do have some three decades of work in cultural evolution built on epidemiological foundations. Existing models don't make the half-baked predictions that author claims arise from an epidemiological perspective.

Copverage in Physorg puts a similar spin on the paper - saying:

Now however, researchers from Cornell University have shown that users adopting Facebook, tend to do so more predictably when receiving invitations from multiple sources, rather than a lot of requests from members of the same group, which implies that Facebook and its growth, does not actually compare with biological contagion at all.

The paper is this one: Structural diversity in social contagion by Johan Ugander, Lars Backstrom, Cameron Marlow, and Jon Kleinberg.

It has thirty one references, practicallly none of which are to the primary literature on cultural evolution. Three cites support their assertion that "traditional" models predict that ideas necessarily spread according to exposure to them - rather than to the extent that recipients want to be exposed to them.

Of course, the actual literature on cultural evolution has long been aware that contagiousness of a cultural entity depends on the properties of the entity, the properties of its hosts, and the structure of the host population (e.g. see Laland and Odling-Smee, 2000) - and it has long recognised both cultural parasitism and mutualism (e.g. see chapters 4 and 5 of Boyd and Richerson, 2005).

Yochai Benkler - resources

Yochai Benkler is interested in cooperation - particularly cooperation among humans. He is interested in net-based collaborative projects - like Wikipedia and Linux.

Videos

Yochai Benkler: Open-source economics

The Penguin and The Leviathan: The Science and Practice of Cooperation

Talks about cultural evolution 31 minutes in.

Book Talk: Yochai Benkler on How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest

Yochai Benkler: After Selfishness - Wikipedia 1, Hobbes 0 at Half Time

Links

His 2011 book The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest.

His home page.

SFI video: The Penguin and The Leviathan: The Science and Practice of Cooperation.

Memetics quotations

I've put together a page of memetics quotations.

Suggestions are welcome by mail or in the comments here.

South Park revisits memes with "Faith Hilling" episode

This recent episode of South Park centres around internet memes.

The episode begins with the boys attempting to get a photo of Cartman "Faith Hilling" (making pretend boobies with your shirt) at a Republican debate.

It continues with planking, owling, Bradying, Tebowing, and "Taylor Swifting" - a curiously-named meme which involves pulling your pants down and rubbing your butt along the ground like a dog. There's also a meme involving shoving a cat's head through a slice of bread and a meme called "Oh Long Johnsoning". There's also a public service announcement about memes (featured above) - which features the catchy tagline:

Use the approved poses if you wanna be a memer. Peace sign, bunny ears, fake wiener.

The idea of "fake wiener" is not at all new - but the specific photographic pose illustrated seems to be largely South Park's invention.

The blurb for the episode reads:

Mankind's evolution begins to accelerate at a rapid and disturbing pace. Concurrently, another species on the planet is exhibiting the same drastic development. Eventually the two species will battle to the death and Faith Hilling may be humanity's only hope.

The whole episode is pretty good. It's also a reasonable advert for memes and memetics. It features a consultation with a meme expert who goes into the history and theory of memes a little (8:30). Here's the specific bit:

The expert has a book apparently called "Memes through the Ages" - or something like that. It traces meme history back through "Fonzying", "mustaching", "Poodle Fisting", "Ass Wedging" and "Donkey Dicking". The book has some funny stuff in it - for example, it says:

In his book "The historical significance of Fonzy", Richard Dawkins states, "Fonzying showed a giant leap forwards in human intelligence because it was a very simple meme..."

I don't want to supply too many spoliers, but just to say it is a suprisingly worthwhile 20 minutes - assuming that you are interested in memes.

News coverage (contains spoilers): New South Park Episode: Faith Hilling, Swifting, Breading and Other Memes).

"Faith Hilling" wikipedia page (contains spoilers).

Here's a "Taylor Swifting video". It was uploaded before the episode aired - and so is probably part of an online publicity campaign. Of course after the episode many uploaded their own Taylor Swifting attempts.

The episode seems to have been somewhat successful in launching both "Faith Hilling" and "Taylor Swifting" memes on the unsuspecting world. "Taylor Swifting" seems to be a reference to Taylor Swift's existing undesirable meme fame at the VMA award ceremony - which we covered here. "Faith Hilling" is presumably a reference to Faith Hill's Stepford Wives breast growth scene.

After this episode, being "Taylor Swifted" now seems to be a pretty reasonable term for unsolicited fame that involves embarassment, grossness or other high negativity.

The rather obvious terms "memer" and "memeing" seem to have had a rather low frequency before the broadcast of this episode. I expect they will become more widely used in the future.

The last South Park "internet meme" episode was Canada on Strike.

William Hamilton on memes

The late William Hamilton - an evolutionary biology superstar - was a meme enthusiast from the early days. In 1977 he correctly predicted that the term would come to dominate - writing:

He floats the term "meme" (short for mimeme) for the cultural equivalent of "gene". Hard as this term may be to delimit - it surely must be harder than gene, which is bad enough - I suspect that it will soon be in common use by biologists and, one hopes, by philosophers, linguists, and others as well and that it may become absorbed as far as the word “gene” has been into everyday speech.

His "Narrow Roads of Gene Land" volumes mention memes at numerous points. Here he is in one of the introductions in "Narrow Roads of Gene Land, Volume 2: Evolution of Sex" from 2002:

Quite possibly new memes that we are creating and are themselves vigorously 'Darwinizing' and thus self-improving may acquire strength to take us over almost completely, much in the way that a brain worm takes over behaviour in an ant. Whenever a weakness in the meme-acceptance system has been discovered there still seems little to stop this happening, at least within an individual lifetime.

As usual, Bill was ahead of his time.

William Burroughs - memetics pioneer

In 1970, William Burroughs wrote "The Electronic Revolution". In it he writes:

And what then is the written word? My basis theory is that the written word was literally a virus that made spoken word possible. The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host...(This symbiotic relationship is now breaking down for reasons I will suggest later.)

...and...

I have frequently spoken of word and image as viruses or as acting as viruses, and this is not an allegorical comparison. It will be seen that the falsifications of syllabic western languages are in point of fact actual virus mechanisms. The IS of identity the purpose of a virus is to SURVIVE. To survive at any expense to the host invaded.

Virus, symbiosis, it not being an analogy - he even talks about "taking the virus eye view" at one point.

Even eariler we had this - from "The Ticket That Exploded" (1962):

From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may once have been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the lungs. The word may once have been a healthy neural cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.

A little later came this - from the essay Ten years and a billion dollars - reprinted in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays (1985):

My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the Other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute. But the Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of a virus: it's an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself.

William Burroughs seems to have grasped a fair chunk of the essence of memetics in these paragraphs - and he did so quite early on. A case of art and science meeting, perhaps.

LOLSpeak

LOLSpeak is a dialect of English that appears to be largely associated with image macros. It features shortened and often misspelled words.

Abbreviation

Like the abbreviations used in mobile phone text messages, instant messages and emails, LOLSpeak is abbreviated. Because space in image macros is limited, LOLSpeak is often highly abbreviated.

Function

LOLSpeak apparently exists to make image macros more surprising, fun - and more shareable.

LOLSpeak sometimes acts like a cultural tag that marks the sender as part of a "cool" net-savvy in-group.

LOLSpeak represents an interesting example of an English subdialect evolving. There's an interesting thesis about the evolution of LOLSpeak.

Examples

Video

References

• SpeakLOLSpeak
• I CAN HAS THESIS?: A LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF LOLSPEAK
• LOLCats - Wikipedia

Richard Brodie reads from "Virus of the Mind"

Here's Richard Brodie reading the introduction to his memetics book "Virus of the Mind".