I just heard about an acquaintance of a friend of mine publishing pictures of herself being filmed by a camera crew, i.e., pictures including the crew.
Background
This seems ridiculous, and pathetic, even infantile, but it's textbook memetics, taken right from the playbook of Edward Bernays. The operative concept in this case is pseudo-variability, i.e., the creation of memes for the purpose of making it seem that a meme is coming from multiple sources, even though it's the same memetic designer producing all of the memes.
Why do this?
The underlying principle of Macromemetics is that cohort members seek a memetic reward (1). When one witnesses a meme (3), the decision as to whether to enact (3) that meme oneself is predicated by the brains' analysis of the likelihood of a reward (1). If one perceives that the meme has a "single source," then the reward opportunity is automatically perceived to be less, i.e., one may be the only one, or the first one, to witness said meme, and so there is no guarantee that it will resonate with anybody else, so one might get no reward, or waste a deployment opportunity (4), or worst of all, lose status (5) by enacting the meme.
The perception that multiple sources, i.e., individuals from disparate sub-cohorts, have already deployed the meme suggests to the meme engine of the brain that there is a much greated guarantee of a reward by deploying the pseudo-mutated meme. In other words, the perception is that the meme is more well-established, more thoroughly propagated, throughout the cohort, than it actually is. More people have seen it, and themselves will see a chance of a reward by resonated with it when they see it deployed by you.
Filming Yourself Being Filmed
How does this meta-publicity acheive pseudo-mutation? Viewing the meta-meme of "somebody" or better yet multiple "somebodies" filming an "important media outlet" filming somebody (7) suggests to the memetic brain that not only are the sub-cohort of the memetic nexus of the "media outlet" being injected with the memes of the target of the filming, but also the one or more persons (presumably unrelated (8)) doing the meta-filming and that their beholden sub-cohorts are being injected with the memetic subsystem of the target individual (9).
Conclusion
Depicting oneself (9) as being a focus of interest of one group, and that interest being of further interest to other groups (8), is a quick and easy way to inject one's own memes into a cohort (10). This is an example of pseudo-mutation in memetic design, since it suggests to the related cohort members that the memetic system being put forward is already accepted in multiple sub-cohorts.
This perceived (8) broader acceptance fools the memetic brain into the perception that a greater potential memetic reward is available, i.e., there is a larger cohort infected with the memetic system than there really is, and so a larger number of individuals who could potentially resonate with that memetic system.
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(1) also known as a "memetic orgasm." The reward is based on others imitating one (enacting a meme one has enacted), acknowledging that one has enacted a meme "corrected" (demonstrated a skill, etc.), or reacting with appropriate related memes in response to a meme one has enacted. The more people resonate (respond), the bigger the reward (2).
(2) This is why live performances are more "compelling" than taped ones, among other things.
(3) The "deployment" or "enactment" of a meme. At the time of this writing, these are considered to be anonymous (I may decide to distinguish novel memes from meme fountains (6) and those re-deployed from other sources, i.e., "deploy" and "enact" refer to any meme enactment, while for novel memes, only "enact" may be used. This may not be meaningful, however.
(4) opportunity costs of deploying memes. Another more reward-rich meme could've been enacted instead, or one could wait for a more opportune moment, doing nothing.
(5) This concept has yet to be fully analysed and elaborated.
(6) See Blackmore, The Meme Machine
(7) Which is already established as a memetic nexus (see index), adding more power.
(8) This is the crux of the "lie" perpetrated by the memetic designer, i.e., that there are separate sources for the meme, i.e., that it has already propagated through the cohort, and mutated along the way, i.e., the fact of its mutation is evidence itself of it's high level of injection into the cohort.
(9) or event or organization or product or political campaign or what-have-you.
(10) or a wider cohort than otherwise possible.
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