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Memecology
Dear memeticists
In linguistics, the suffix -eme is always a reference to the smallest unitary
element, so I have always been reluctant to consider as viable a theory which
imagines memory and evolution as particulate, composed only of little fragments.
When I was invited (through who knows what memetic function) to subscribe to
this list, I was much happier with the concept of memesis, with its connotations
of genesis (to me that much more than genetics -- a process rather thana
technology) and mimesis interwoven with emergence and continuity.
Last time I went there, Jaron Lanier's homepage had a funny, passionate and
credible tirade against knowbots: they were too neat, too
bureaucratically-minded, too instrumental; and they cut us off from exactly that
sense of serendipity and complexity that allows the net to have something of the
complexity of human interactions. I agree. Daniel Kelly writes:
I realize something about=20
this online discussion phenomena. I am reading articulate statements=20
about important stuff and trying to get into shoes of whoever's talking.=20
In a full contact conversation, I base alot of my judgment on the validit=
y=20
of opinions by decidng how much fun the proponent of a particular view is=
=20
to be around.
In netspace, this has surely to do with the complexity, that is the richness of
connections and interweavings that evolve from an initial contact.
This may involve conflict, but only as conflict is essential (as death is
essential) to an ecology. Memesis is, for me, the phenomenon of an emergent
ecology, and has to do with the interrealtions between all these events -- a
continuation of the massive and age-old conversations that are the
consciousness, the culture of our species. The model for me might be translation
-- the slow approximation of my understanding to your talking, the slow
approximation of your talk to my understanding, accomplished through all the
strategies we can find to use.
The issue at hand might then concern:
- making a sphere of interactivity at maximum complexity from which something
other than ourselves might evolve
- entering into conflictual relationships with anything that threatens the
memodiversity of the cyberenvironment
- making translations between the complexity of the web and the complexity of
the genetic and social worlds
At which stage the strategies might emerge: and I'd suggest they should be
neither artistic in the old sense, nor scientific in the old sense, but
technological in the newer sense - involving technologies of writing,
technologies of the body, technologies of space and time, the social, the
historical and so on. This technology extends beyond hard, soft and wet, to the
new geography we are aware of, and the old history we have lost sight of, the
one that insists there is a future, against all odds, against the present,
against the planned and administered, a future we cannot know at all until we
get there, but which it is our business to keep available.
That is what I understand it is to be human. That is what communication is for.
It does mean being against what stops the emergence of the new: but it doesn't
condemn us to assassinating the already dead.
>From a liverpool sky the colour of a thrush's egg
*Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will*
Sean
Sean Cubitt
Reader in Video and Media Studies
Liverpool John Moores University
Dean Walters Building
St James Road
Liverpool L1 7BR
UK
0151 231 5030
