Background
I'm going to try to write a bunch of Macromemetics essays on basic principles of Macromemetics for the textbook I'm going to write during National Novel Writing Month. I want to get these ideas down and hopefully use them in my novel, and get enough written before November actually arrives so I not have to write them during the month of November.
Introduction
It always bothered me shows and bios about newspaper people like Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward or the character Denzel Washington plays in The Pelican Brief and more recently the two women from The New York Post who broke the Harvey Weinstein story for that paper.
It all gets thrown in the trash, or used to wrap fish, like the next day. Why? Why is all this effort spent, for months, only to have it appear somewhere in a newspaper for one day, never to return?
I have a similar problem with how motion pictures used to be released, prior to on-line video, or before that, videotape. Before that, once a movie left the theatres, usually after only one to two weeks, it was gone forever.
Why does this make sense? It may make a lot of sense in terms of Macromemetics. In fact, in light of the theories of Macromemetics, it might not make sense for things to be any other way. And yes, that's weird, but also a relief to finally have an answer for what seems like a waste of resources and creativity.
Memetic Nexuses Membership
As defined elsewhere, a memetic nexus is a meme source to which some cohort of individuals, memetic agents, are directly connected. This does not mean, necessarily, that memes generated by this source are automatically and unquestioningly injected, but that they are at least received.
For instance, the President of the United States is a memetic Nexus. Within a few jumps, from the President's mouth or a press secretary, to reporters, to media outlets and so on, and within a very short time everybody on the planet has Heard what the president has said. It doesn't mean that everybody believes what he or she has said, but they believe that he or she has said it, and everybody knows it.
The effect of this is that repeating any of these ex presidentia memes means that everybody you're speaking to has Heard them, which guarantees memetic resonance.
So the Benefit of being a member of the memetic cohort of a given memetic Nexus is that you are guaranteed a collection of memes to choose from to deploy which Will resonate with all your fellow members of the cohort.
Guaranteed resonance within your cohort is what it is all about.
Nexuses and Novelty
Okay, but why are we wrapping old Presidential press releases around fish and then chucking them out? Why do we (did we) see a movie once when it comes out, and then never again?
There are a couple of problems to do with memetic inventory. One is determining the canon, and another is learning it all...enough. In order to function within a memetic cohort and have reliable resonance therewith, you have to know all the relevant memes, and you have to know which ones are important.
This starts to sound like academia or religión. Memetically, they are quite similar. Both have a rabinical or professorial class who sift through all of the memes and give them priority. Anyone wanting to join the given cohort must learn this canon which has been set down. It is a high barrier to entry.
The other problem is that if every magazine, every newspaper, every movie or TV show were to accumulate, it would rapidly grow into an impossibly large mass of information, of memes, and maintaining, accessing, and choosing between them would be increasingly difficult.
Novelty solves this, partly, for us. If we follow sports, or the weather, or the news, we have new memes arriving all the time. Who got elected, what event happened, which teams played, is it going to rain tomorrow, was the weather nice this week, and so on.
Every day new stuff, the old stuff effectively erased, and the memetic agent is on potentially equal footing with everybody else, able to respond to the (new) memes they deploy, or to employ new ones which they are guaranteed to be able to resonate with.
Summary and Conclusions
A memetic Nexus offers the opportunity to join a memetic cohort where one is regularly refreshed with new memes to deploy and resonate with.
Novelty solves the problem of having to maintain and prioritize a collection of memes that grows continually without limit.
Being a subscriber to a lively memetic Nexus, where one can be part of a highly-connected cohort, in the same memetic fabric (1), offers the possibilty of Access to reliable memetic orgies without a lot of front-loading in terms of study or learning of a large memetic canon which would otherwise be necessary, for example, in joining a religión or becoming an expert in a field of academic study.
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(1) it's possible for collections of agents to be part of disjoint memetic fabrics, i.e., not readily connected to one another.
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