Memetic Essays LIST - Manga Index
Introduction
Last time I brought up micromemetics, and I still need to dig into a few basic concepts that are needed in order to look at macromemetics. I hope as well to be able to start to link in some of my essays that illustrate some of these ideas as we move forward.
At some point I need to introduce the Three Laws of Macromemetics and the Three Laws of Immunomemetics. These require familiarity with a few concepts and assumptions which may take me a few Mondays to build up to.
More Micromemetics
We assume that a human is a "memetic agent," which means that at any given moment in time the agent has a collection of memes at his or her disposal to deploy to other agents. Which other agents? These are the agents which are memetically connected to the first agent. Memetically connected means that agents are able to share memes over some form of communication medium. An obvious example is a group of people who live in the same town and speak the same language. Another example is a group of French, Chinese, Korean, and American players of an immersive MMORPG (1). They have no shared location or language, but they interact in an environment that supports memetic interactions.
Some definitions: an agent is of course a person who can take part in memetic interactions. A cohort is a group of agents who are able to interact memetically with one another. A memetic inventory is the collection of all memes, either of an individual agent, or of the "memetic fabric," or of the entire cohort.
Here we start making some finer distinctions. A cohort is a group of individuals. This is related to but not exactly the same as a "memetic fabric." A memetic fabric refers to the cohort of agents, the inventory of all the memes those agents know how to use with one another, and describes the nature of the medium or environment within which the agents communicate memetically with one another.
Let's review. An agent may speak, say, Japanese and English, but in an English-speaking environment the Japanese bit, the Japanese memes in the form of Japanese language and writing system and Japanese culture are part of the memetic inventory of the given agent, but are not relevant to the memetic fabric of the given cohort of which the Japanese speaker may find himself a member. So saying things in Japanese or writing things in Chinese characters will not resonate with the rest of the cohort.
The memetic inventory of the given memetic fabric is what determines which memes are available to members either to deploy or to (possibly) resonate with. If you deploy a meme that nobody else "gets" then you are not going to get resonance. Your jokes are not going to land, to take one example.
Foundational Micromemetics Essay
Summary
So we've described what groups of people look like from a memetic point of view. Memetic agents (people) are in the same cohort if they are able to interact with one another memetically. Typically we think of them as living in the same place, sharing a lot of cultural norms, and speaking the same language, but this is not necessarily the case.
A memetic fabric is a term for the minimally intersecting subset of cohort agents and the minimal memetic inventory they share. Individual members may have a more extensive inventory, in other words, the superset of all of the mememtic vocabulary (inventory) of all the cohort members may be quite large, but the inventory of the memetic fabric is only those memes shared by all cohort members.
"If not everybody gets it, then it's not a thing."
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(1) In a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), such as World of Warcraft, one can see the other players, see their gestures, often hear what they say (not much good across different languages), and also "pass" things like pat messages and quests.
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