模倣子 Attention Vampires

Memetic Essays LIST - Manga Index 

Introduction 

I've been interested in conversations and how they go wrong. I've also come up with the idea of an attention vampire who wants others to just sit around and not talk while they talk, and are willing to do a lot of antisocial stuff in order to preserve this flow of attention.

By chance, I ran across this "essay" on The Medium that talks about treating other people as mannequins, which may be how attention vampires see the people around them.

Attention as a Commodity 

In Reëvaluation Counseling theory, human attention is of primary importance. We pay therapists a lot to listen, which may or may not be a good example. We are able to discharge emotional distress in the presence of others, with their attention focused on us. In memetics, we want the same thing, we want people to pay attention to us, to allow us to deploy our memes without blocking, and possibly deploy memes in response.

Immunomemes & Attention 

What about immunomemes? One aspect of them is that the deployer is not really paying much attention to the agent they are attacking with their immunomeme. Immunomemes, blocking memes, are no-brainers, and they also are mainstays of attention vampires. They don't have to pay attention to what anybody said that's not them, they don't have to spend any effort shutting other people down, and the blocker memes are guaranteed to land. 

That's what immunomemes do. They don't take any brain time, any cycle time, they don't require any thought, even when they just "bracket" what they other person said or did, and they are engrained in the cohort, the other people hanging around, so they are highly certain to land, usually in the form of the other members just letting the attention vampire's abuse go by unchallenged.

Residual Memetic Debt & Symmetry Breaking 

Okay, this sounds like a mouthful, but we can see how immunomems (blocking memes) and alliance memes (support memes) can look exactly the same. For instance, "That's interesting" can be sarcastic or dismissive, or it can be supportive. The difference between the two appears to be whether the initial agent gets a reward or not, i.e., whether they are blocked or supported.

Hence, the "symmetry" between alliance memes and immunomemes, the fact that they look like one another, and behave like one another in memetic systems, is broken, or resolved, or clarified, made so we can tell one from another, by whether there is residual memetic debt dumped on the initiating agent, or whether this residual memetic debt is paid off completely by a resonance with the other agents, i.e., they get a reward.

To try to illustrate what residual memetic debt is and how important it is, I've linked to several essays that discuss it.

Residual Memetic Debt Essays 

The Candy Conspiracy
Libidinal Bribes and Memetic Debt 
Memetic Loops and Residual Memetic Debt 
Garnering Allies 
The Grief of Loss 
Contact Memes and the Corporation 

Summary & Conclusions 

There's such a thing as an attention vampire, which is kind of obvious since human attention is a precious commodity and that is in turn super-relevant to macromemetics. Memetics rewards are actually closely related to human attention.

Attention vampires use specific memes, immunomemes (blocking memes), to keep the spotlight on them. I will delve into the details of these memes later, which will hopefully make it easier to identify attention vampires.