模倣子 Macromemetic Monday

Memetic Essays LIST - Manga Index 

Introduction 

I hit a brick wall trying to inject my "Unlitterbug Meme" (1) into the population of my town, as I mentioned before. My frustration sort of coalesced around this image of "What does it take for people to adopt some new system of behavior? A bus full of orphans going over a cliff?!"

Macabre image, I know.

I had also been thinking about my fellow engineers at work. Our "company color" was blue, so I thought that it would be cool if everybody wore blue shirts, one day a week, say, on Tuesday. My motivation was not entirely frivolous. A chum of mine had gotten promoted to team supervisor and he lamented that when you get promoted, you don't get paid any more (2), but your workload instantly triples. There is your regular work, but then also a bunch of managerial stuff, meetings, reports, and so on, and finally cracking the whip and organizing your new team.

The Apathetic Team 

A lot of wasted effort comes from the team not working as a whole. The manager needs to get information like productivity numbers, for example, and if he has to go around and wheedle and cajole everybody every single week, it equals a lot of lost productivity. A lot of the managerial reports consist of getting this information, so if the team could help out more, it would save time.

Then you have the problem of social loafing. Nobody's telling me to do it until the manager comes around and bothers me, and as soon as he leaves I'm footloose and fancy free again. Or rather, the immediate demands of my job and my coworkers are always there, but the manager's silly needs for my productivity numbers are abstract, and not as pressing.

So how do you make the manager's needs to be "pressing." Explaining over and over again why I have to get the TPS report ready for the Thursday afternoon meeting doesn't seem to work. Everybody always slacks on getting their data and reports ready on time, I end up working late on Wednesday every week. And it never changes.

The Feedback Problem 

My vague idea was that something like "Blue Shirt Tuesday" would be something that could "anchor" more directly relevant activities. Mainly I wanted to see if I could inject something, anything, into the population of my fellow engineers and then it might be possible to inject more useful things later. Something to do with "let's all get our productively numbers done by the end of the day on Tuesday" or something.

The idea was to get team members to "bully" each other to perform objectives that purely served the manager, the team, even if they weren't directly related to their own immediate tasks.

This required a number of things, which I discovered in the course of injecting my first real memetic system into the population. I discovered marking and closure and how they work together with "bullying opportunities" (5) to produce a stable memetic system. I also discovered that it's incredibly easy to inject a memetic system into a population, if certain requirements are met.

Summary

My motivation for my earliest experiments (6) was to see how easy it was to inject a memetic system into a population (or if it was possible at all). My long-term motivation was to make the workplace more efficient, e.g., improve communication between team members, make it automatic and reliable, and make sure that all functions, including higher-level managerial functions which were abstract to lower-level workers, would also get fulfilled with total reliability and high efficiency. All of this was to be without managers having to do a bunch of unnecessary legwork.

I'll get to my "Blue Shirt Tuesday" experiment (about which I have a number of posted essays) soon!

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(1) Trying to get everybody in my town into the habit of picking up just one piece of litter per day, every day, and thereby through mass cooperation to make our town litter-free. Great idea, no? If only everybody could just get along!

(2) One perk, a "perky perk" you might say, is that the local office assistant, typically a winsome young woman (3), suddenly starts paying attention to you, asking how she can help you

(3) Yes, this is a totally sexist characterization. Duh. However, more on this later. There may be some very significant ramifications for promotions and power in the workplace. It may well be the case that men are willing to literally kill themselves with extra work for no extra pay for the guarantee of female attention (4).

(4) Even if this attention is not explicitly sexual in nature. Men may also be able to "multiplex" or "superpose" or "sum up" semi-sexual encounters spread out over time, e.g., getting a smile from ten women for holding the door for them, a smile and a kind word from a barista, a few five-minute meetings with the office assistant, and a couple of "good mornings" from a couple of female engineers (who now notice him because he's a supervisor) may all add up to the equivalent of a night of passionate lovemaking with one woman (which he no longer has time for anyway since he's so busy  with his supervisor job). More psycho-social research required here. If this is true for men (and not true for women), then the ramifications may be sweeping. First, it means that women have tremendous "soft power" over men which they may not be using efficiently (American women, especially, perhaps). Another implication is that there may be little or no limit to the degree to which men may be motivated to get arbitrarily large amounts of work and commitment out of them, even to the point of self-harm (of which there is plenty of evidence, e.g., the Presidency of the USA, CEOs of large companies, generals leading armies, etc.). Again, this may have huge implications for the gender dynamics of power in the workplace and in society. More research needed here, and it may be for the psychologists and sociologists to perform, at first.

(5) I came to link "bullying opportunities" to "immunomemes." A bullying opportunity is a chance to deploy an immunomeme, which is like any other meme, basically, but it has certain interesting properties which I would spend a lot of time researching later.

(6) My later experiments began to focus on the more practical, e.g., getting people to do things that were typically hard to get them to do, such as fill in workplace suggestions, change the way they did inventory in the factory, and behave properly and show up on time for the school bus.