A Meme By Any Other Name

The controversial meta-meme that memes are controversial, seems to have spread … like a meme.

This post is partly in response to this article in Andrew Brown’s Guardian Blog, and partly as a result of a comment thread that became attached to an earlier (unrelated) post here, comments in several threads over at Sam’s Elizaphanian blog, and a couple of e-mail exchanges with Sam. This post is in two parts – initially my own summary of the “state of play” with memes, followed by a very simple alternative formulation of the original “mimetic” idea.

Memes – The State of the Union

Some see red mist at the mention of the word, associating it with the archetypal “scientific fundamentalists” hell bent on their (apparent) reductive dehumanising crusade against the evils of religion and against the virtues, vices and vagueries of human nature. Others seem equally hell bent on destroying or trivializing the word meme by abusing it to mean various “tag you’re it” exchanges of lists, surveys and quizzes in the blogosphere, ironically exploiting the power of memes in general in the process of propagating the low quality and the trivial. Yet others simply refuse to see that the word meme says anything more useful than the word idea.

I’m happy to claim the “physicalist”  tag for myself, and to use the word meme as originally intended, yet still equally happy to brand the scientific fundamentalists as religious zealots in their own right. But I’m not in the business of flogging dead horses. If the word meme is lost on the battlefield, distinguishing the concept of meme from the concept of idea remains crucial to promoting quality thinking and our decision-making as individuals within democracies. Defending us all from an evolutionary slide into lowest common denominator mediocrity … and worse.

Enough of the pre-amble, what am I proposing ? We need to establish if the essence of the original concept is valuable and, if so, propose an alternative name and context for use in future discourse.

Meme is itself a meme. The origins of the word in mimesis was cleverly coined into meme (by Dawkins) precisely because of the allusion to the word gene as a “unit of reproduction” in the processes of evolution. The parallel is actually a very good one; in both cases it concerns the copying of information. In both cases it concerns the processes by which copies are generated and the mechanisms by which the information copied affects future processes. In both cases we need to be concerned with syntactical aspects of how the information is symbolically represented and with semantic aspects of what it means to the future processes. In both cases we need to be concerned with fecundity; the rate at which the propogation of copies can occur, and with fidelity; the rate at which copies are identical or mutated from the original – both syntactically and semantically. And so on …

Meme being a meme however, the idea has circulated into use with mixed levels of understanding. It has also circulated in an environment where its use has had very marked and divergent rhetorical intent by those engaged in highly emotive evolution and science vs religion and faith debates. But the same is (or was) true of genes.

What is it about memes that the gain-sayers so …. despise.

Firstly there is the reductive and deterministic impression, of reducing thinking and ideas to atomic units. But the same is true of genes, seemingly reducing biology and life itself to similar atomic units, bouncing off each other with gay Netwonian abandon. All but the die hards seem to have got over this delusion when it comes to the role of genes in physical and biological evolution, and can accept that life’s more complicated than that, however simplistic their understanding of genes. And make no mistake, genes are in no way as well bounded as units, or as well defined in their functions as pop-understanding would believe.

Both memes and genes suffer from fears associated with their “life of their own” that somehow leave the human species and individual brains as mere hosts in the process. Anyone attaching such significance to the “selfish gene / meme” metaphors would do well to ponder on where there own free (selfish) will actualy resides.

Memes are of course different to genes in what seems a fundamental way. It’s the old mind vs body distinction. We can just about live with scientists subjecting the biology of life to scientific description, but not the vital spark of humanity, oh no, that would be a step too far. But this is pure prejudice. This is not the place to attempt to explain too-greedy reductionism, the flip-side of determinism or the emergence of purpose from complexity …. nor the whole mind / body / free-will debate … but anyone believing that these haven’t been or can’t be explained properly are  …. prejudiced. Anyone seriously wishing to understand evolutionary explanations of mind and consciousness should read Dennett – without prejudice. (References to Dennett dotted throughout this blog.)

As we will see prejudice in the strict sense is fundamental to understanding memes, but in order to spare those of a nervous disposition, that’s the last time I will use the word meme in this piece.

Mimetic Ideas

A mimetic idea is an idea which has mimetic qualities. What are these qualities and why is it useful to understand them ?

A mimetic idea is an idea that is easy to recall, communicate and spread through many minds (and blogs and published media of any kind – creating many “copies”). That ease has two distinct but related aspects.

Syntactically – an idea with catchy symbolism – a word / phrase / image that is easy to recognize and attractive to a recipient and easy to communicate physically. Easy is a matter of degree, but in the extreme this communication could even happen unintentionally or absent mindedly.

Semantically – an idea that seems easy to understand .  An idea that fits with existing understanding, without too much additional judgement or rational thought being applied to the inherent quality and import of its content. The initial understanding is “prejudiced“. That initial understanding may also be incomplete, or even partly misunderstood, but this does not actually get in the way of that initial acceptance nor the onward communication.

Notice that a key feature of both the syntactical and semantic communication aspects is that in both cases the “ease” is tending to by-pass more considered thought. This is not to say the everyone who communicates such an idea does so thoughtlessly, but the tendency is clear. We could at this point debate the relative values of immediate and considered understanding, but it seems non-controversial to suggest a tendency to bypass more thoughtful consideration is more problematic the more significant the subject of the idea.

Such a tendency is also more significant given the explosion in on-line electronic communication and the rise in more automated feeds and readers.

There are important corollaries to this point. These are not news, they are as old as thought itself, simply of greater significance given this explosion in communications, as noted earlier by the likes of McLuhan. The main quality of ideas that spread is that they are easy – ie simple and prejudiced – not that they are inherently good or useful in any other sense. The ease of communication and the simplification aspect of any prior misunderstanding is reinforced in the process [autocatalytic – Rayner]. Ideas that require any complexity of explanation and understanding, or that may be “game-changing” in any sense that jars with current received wisdom are disadvantaged and even drowned-out, whether they are inherently any good or not.

The evolution of ideas continues apace. Good ideas are ever more disadvantaged and ideas that fit simply with received wisdom are ever more advantaged. This needs to be understood, and the environment for cultivation of good ideas improved using that understanding. Evolution involves nurture as well as nature.

Understanding the mimetic nature of ideas is itself a useful idea in the quest for the answer to “how should we live?”

Go Google Go

Well I never, it has happened.  Google  Operating System running from the power on the web side, called “Chrome OS”

I’ve been a user of GMail since its creation (just out of beta after 5 years), as well Google Spreadsheets and Google Chrome Browser. Love both of the latter, though I have to admit I’ve dropped back to the MS products, because I keep having compatibility problems in the otherwise MS world of real domestic and corporate life. Google Wave looks really powerful too.

I was a Blogger blogger before Google acquired it, but switched to WordPress simply because Blogger was behind on features I needed. I have to say that now, I’m not really satisfied with WordPress – it’s open-source development is so focussed on fashionable fads and cosmetic widgets that any “serious” content management development doesn’t get a look in. But hey, they are both web server driven so they are independent problems – there will never be any Google vs WordPress incompatibilities.

Doing so much with wiki products recently too, that MS Office authoring tools are really becoming redundant as a package. I think Google can pull this off. Look out for Google Chrome OS Netbooks in 2010.

Norms breed norms

Interesting, but not unpredictable behaviour.

Wow, almost two weeks since I last blogged – must complete the Soul Craft review.

Talking of graffiti – I’ve lived in places before with explicit zero tolerance of graffiti but where we live in Oslo at the moment, there appears to be a high tolerance of crude tagging as well as more elaborate “art”. To a Brit, Norwegian public behaviour can generally appear quite offensive – ignorant of personal space in public places – stepping out of doorways onto public side-walks, groups stationary or moving toward you taking up whole sidewalks, smoking in-your-face, standing or reaching between you and the goods in shopping aisles, as well as the ubiquitous queuing difficulties. Clearly just cultural differences of what is normally accepted behaviour.

Talking of queuing difficulties, we were back in the UK last week – in various bars in Keswick – and remarked on the contrast with recent Oslo experience. Even in bars three-deep with no formal (physical) queuing – the queuing actually happens in the heads of competent bar-staf and eye-contact amongst the punters with barely a word spoken – of course it breaks down if the punters don’t get the feedback on which to trust that the bar-staff are playing the game – then it’s every man for himself. No Norwegians to test it out on, but a couple of confused Americans in the mix. Of course the locals nudge the visible foreigners and whisper “you’re after him” and even “no, you were before me”. Americans of course have no trouble with politeness, but it can scare some.

Not Short on Wisdom

I’ve now read almost two thirds of “Shop Class as Soulcraft“.

I like to blog my book reviews in segments, because unless I’m genuinely surprised by picking up a book in the first place, I am always conscious that I’m reading it because is seems to fit my agenda (positively or negatively).  I like to separate initial impressions and expectations from actual content and analysis. If I express my expectations early (before reading more than introductory chapters) I can be kept honest when blogging later about surprising significance or, more often, unsurprising confirmation of content related to my agenda.

So first admission – I underestimated Matthew Crawfords experience and wisdom. The US-centric writing still grates, but the lessons expressed seem well founded and well articulated. In fact if my disappointment with the content is that I’ve heard it all before, is really an expression of envy that I wish I could have written it, whereas he did.

The other impression to correct is that in fact a good deal of Crawford’s book is indeed thoughtful narrative and autobiography, probably 50/50 interwoven with the critical review – overall the style is easily readable and the language straight talking … idiot, stupid, motherfucker … sprinkled within a good turn of phrase.

“Yes, yes, yes, tell me something I don’t know”, says more about me than Matthew and his book, which I find very good, both in content and wit. He sums up the problem for the increasingly globalised world for me in one short question.

“Is this our society as a whole, buying more education only to scale new heights of stupidity ?”

He is talking here about academic, intellectual, institutional high-school, college education and beyond to grad schools. His eventual conclusion is going to be that we individually and society as a whole would be better off if more of us experienced more “shop” trade / craft skills training earlier, and more of us saw the value of this engagement with the real when moving into working for a living, in whatever field that turns out to be.

As I mentioned in the initial impressions, there is much more parallel to Pirsig’s ZMM, than is actually acknowledged. So much of the descriptions at length of maintenance / re-build jobs – particularly the diagnostic aspects – are so reminiscent of Pirsig describing his “gumption traps” … the stepping back from the physical to the conceptual and returning from another angle, the involvement of the frame of mind with the hard physical frame of the motorcycle … the fact that what you know affects what you see, and so on.

Like so many before he sees the paradox of the drive to detach the self from the physical as inherited from “Descarte’s Error”, but Crawford’s prescription is the practical one of the processes of learning by doing above, rather than seeking any metaphysical solution.

Another aspect that works well for me is that Crawford does recognize very well the institutional hypocrisies in so much of business management and organizational behaviour, dealing as it does with the complexities and paradoxes of many levels from operational to abstract, from here and now to tactical and strategic. And correctly that the issues are more “moral” than logical or scientific …. previously summed up nicely by John Z Delorean as

“Committees of moral men often make immoral decisions”

or the unattributed …

“Losing your ethics on the drive to the office.”

He points out that the absurdities we find so amusing but somehow so close to reality in “Dilbert” surely contain the message that there is something seriously wrong in general – absurd in fact – with the worlds of work and business. I totally agree. Not sure yet that he has anything new to offer here … but I’ll be back.

Thinking and Doing

Talking of working class heros, as I was in the previous post, I have just started reading Matthew Crawford’s “Shop Class a Soulcraft”.

I skimmed though all the notes, references, the introduction and general structure , and so far just read the first two chapters “A Brief Case for the Useful Arts” and “The Separation of Thinking from Doing”.

By way of pre-amble, this book has received a fair bit of publicity and high-profile reviews, and these have been circulating in the community of Robert Pirsig fans because it is aparent from those reviews that the subject matter of Crawford’s book is very similar to that of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. And the sub-title “An Inquiry into the Value of Work” is clearly a nod to Pirsig’s work. The style is of course completely different, this being a conventional academic treatise rather than a creative narrative work [correction].

In fact I find that there are significant references to and quotes from Pirsig’s ZMM, though no overall acknowledgement. But that is not surprising since Crawford is at pains to steer away from any mysticism or “wistful romantic” explanations of his subject matter. (More surprising is that the whole passage “Motorcycle as Mule” in the Chapter “Master of One’s Own Stuff” could have come straight from the pages of ZMM, but has no reference.)

It may prove to be a mistake to ignore those aspects, but I’ll need to reserve judgement until I’m through. Crawford’s limited pragmatic objective is clearly stated as “a set of arguments on behalf of work that is meaningful because it is useful”. So far it is very good, and I find little to disagree with – with one nauseating exception.

The book is myopically US-centric – so much so that the value and quality of work is very much in terms of whether US workers and customers benefit from it rather than unworthy foreigners. Sad. Less of a concern is the fact that Crawford’s age and inexperience [correction] have you hoping he has a wise head on young shoulders and hoping the book isn’t one long plug for his own successful motorcycle maintenance business, after dropping out from a potentially high-flying “knowledge work” career. Less of a concern because he already says so much that is truly good.

Significantly he cites being introduced to Al MacIntyre’s work as deeply influential – which is odd given that he has chosen mainly the treatise rather than narrative style. MacIntyre’s position is that we are all writing our own stories in the context of humanity’s cumulative narrative.

There is much about de-skilling and automation, and on the perceived value of blue-collar “manual work” in preference to white-collar “knowledge work” – which is missing the point about creative work. But he correctly nails the real issue when looking at the “offshoring” of services that can be delivered “down a wire”. The point is not that electronic is bad and manual is good, but whether the important value is generated algorithmically – which can and should be automated. Whether the delivered value is in physical or informational products is irrelevant, the important thing is how much human thought does it take to create that value ? If it doesn’t take much, then it make sense to automate it as far as efficiently possible for the mental well being of the human doing the work, as for the basic economics of the transaction.

Where a productive task (genuinely) doesn’t require mental effort, it makes sense not to ask a human with a brain to do the task. But it makes no sense to artificially exclude the involvement of the human brain where it adds value – knowing how to work out what to do when the established procedure fails or encounters variations. All of which is a good lead into Taylorism and scientific management and those over zealous Harvard MBA’s that bought this stuff.

This is my original agenda, and indeed prominent in my manifesto – “management that mistook itself for a science”. There are some wonderful quotes from F W Taylor that bring home just how misguided the “time and motion” economics of production misses the point of value. In theory at least, freeing mental power from mechanical tasks is positive because of the “opportunity” of that mental power to be applied to more creative tasks. This is where Crawford identifies the problem;

According to Taylor “All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centred in the planning department …”

Crawford recognizes that “It is a mistake to suppose that the primary purpose of this partition is to render the work process more efficient. It may or may not extract more value from a given unit of labour time. The concern is rather with labor cost.”

Spot on. More autistic economics.

Of course it is right to organize working at levels of abstracted knowledge in planning of complex undertakings involving many skills of many productive people – life is just too short for the collective brain to interact and iterate from individual lessons of the whole organization. But that is no reason to control out the autonomy of the individual brains – quite the reverse. “All life is problem solving.” – Popper.

The consumerism side of the production economy is an interesting angle, could easily lead us to the capitalist conspiracy agendas …

 Reading on …

Cloughie

Mentioned somewhere I had been reading David Peace’s “The Damned United” fiction-based-on-fact story of Brian Clough’s 44 days in charge of Leeds United in 1974. The narrative is interwoven with his managerial carreer up to that point at Derby County and previously Hartlepool United. (Also released as a film – I’ve not seen yet.)

Immediately afterwards I also read the story of Cloughie’s time following the above at Nottingham Forest, entitled “Provided You Don’t Kiss Me – 20 Years With Brian Clough”, a biography by journalist Duncan Hamilton.

Despite  Hamilton saying to Peace in conversation that he didn’t recognise the same Cloughie, I have to say I very much did. The fiction seems every bit as real as the facts, and thanks to Cloughie’s level of public persona both fit with my experiences at the time too. Hamilton does admit of course that the event – the move from Leeds to Forest – that separates the one book from the other was life-changing for Clough – he was two different people.

Both are painfully honest, but I can’t see why either would be branded as putting him in a bad light – in both you see how human he really was. I guess I need to see the fim version to understand the criticisms of Peace’s piece.

A surprising text book on general management do’s and don’ts, wise and unwise career decisions, notwithstanding the very particular story of the central character. In both cases well-written recommended reads especially for the nostalgic pining for real football before the advent of Sky money and The Premiership. They don’t make working class hero’s like that any more, and probably won’t ever again.