Memetic Essays LIST - Manga Index
Introduction
I had a chat with a friend and he recognized the "attention vampire" concept and said it is also known as the "emotional vampire" and at least one other term.
We got into the idea that another friend pitched, i.e., that vampires might be acting out of residual memetic debt. This works rather better than my go-to idea that attention vampires are just sucking as reliable and minimal attention out of an environment, kind of starvation level. It's under-motivated.
With a residual memetic debt model of attention vampirism, the motivation is strong, and the willingness to deploy immunomemes in defense of one's position becomes clearer. It might actually give us a clearer idea of how residual memetic debt is "laid in," e.g., by the deployment of immunomemes against the RMD sufferer (obviously) and then the RMD sufferer might then be motivated to deploy the same or similar immunomemes in order to defend their vampires position.
Related Essays
模倣子 What Makes for Good Conversations and Meetings?
模倣子 The Memetics of Intergenerational Abuse and Genocide
Residual Memetic Debt
The idea is that making a social overture, in other words, putting a meme out there for everybody else to see, or "deploying a meme" (3) incurs a risk, which I call memetic debt. I model it as a "loop" that is opened by the initiator, the deployer, in the hope that it will be "closed" by the response of others. If this offer is blocked, as opposed to accepted, then the initial offerer is left with residual memetic debt. I have come to see residual memetic debt, the avoidance of it, the trying to resolve it somehow (which seems to be non-trivial), as the root of many human woes (5).
One possible way to think of residual memetic debt is that "I should've gotten more," be it more laughs, more attention, more money, more food, whatever. Does residual memetic debt involve "resentment" and be directed towards individuals...or groups? Probably.
Do Attention Vampires Suffer from Residual Memetic Debt?
This was suggested by my first friend, and I like the idea. It seemed really obvious when he said it, but it might actually require a certain amount of fleshing out.
But this could be fun, since it could give us a practical, measurable example of how residual memetic debt produces long-term dysfunctional behavior (5). This seems to explain a lot, but it's really quite theoretical only at this point.
One strong point is that the vampire is motivated, not only by starvation (which leads to violence, etc.) but also by the desire to enact memes which they were denied during their victimization (where the RMD was laid in). They ALSO would be motivated to enact the same immunomemes which were deployed against them during RMD in-laying. If they were interrupted, ignored, etc., they would tend to turn to these same immunomemets against others in the expression of their residual memetic indebtedness sickness.
The idea is that if we could "cure" the residual memetic debt problem of the attention vampire, they would come right and start acting like functional human beings, no longer obsessed with always being in the spotlight, cruelly shutting down other people to prove that they are the most interesting person, and droning on constantly.
But is there any evidence that this might be the case?
Draining Off Residual Memetic Debt
How do you get this paid back, if your memetic deployment, your offering, already failed, got rejected, got immunomemetically smacked down? That's what my second friend and I talked about. I really got interested in my first friend's idea that residual memetic debt was what was driving conversation vampirism, because although eking out a meagre dribble of human attention by monologuing and monopolizing a conversation is a way to survive, kind of like a regular vampire locked in jail along with a used Band-Aid (4), i.e., it's really meagre and pathetic and bland, and so unsatisfying, that these kinds of people deliberately setting up and staging often complex situations just so they can slowly drain their hapless victims of their attention over a period of hours while they drone on is just so...well, mosquitos and ticks seem like noble beasts by comparison.
Okay, so can RMD be "paid back" (5) ever? This is a huge question. If you laugh at enough of the AV's jokes and comments, will they finally get it and settle down and stop being such a sociopath, or if you include them in enough exchanges they'll get that participation is more fun than monopolizing everything? Are they acting out of fear? They fear losing the talking stick because they'll never get it back or others will ridicule them?
All good questions.
Summary & Conclusions
The well-known phenomenon of the attention vampire (6) may stem from residual memetic debt. An individual who has been ignored or cut dead or cut off too many times, and never really had the chance to be listened to may have a lot of memetic loops (7) left open, and residual memetic debt accrued, such that they are continually trying to "work the other side" of the memetic loop and be the one that gets to do all the talking and have everybody else pay attention.
This idea works in terms of the theory as I understand it. Residual memetic debt causes one to try to enact complementary memes to the ones that one could not "close" (8) during the period the RMD was laid in.
Open questions include whether residual memetic debt is behind attention vampiric behavior (and other dysfunctional behaviors), what laying in of residual memetic debt actually looks like (9), and whether and how it's possible to "pay back" or "cure" residual memetic debt toxicosis. I have theories to work out (what residual memetic debt and memetic loops look like), and also experiments to design (treating attention vampires and other sociopaths with meme therapy, which also needs theory-building).
___________________________________________
(1) There is "deploying a meme" which is putting it out there where everybody can see and evaluate it, as opposed to "enacting a meme" which may involve only rehearsing a speech, a trick, testing out a move, or trying out part of a move (meaningless by itself (2)). The difference between actually "deploying" and only "enacting" or "practicing" may be that one is risking memetic debt in one and not in the other (3).
(2) Much like Shoe & Shoelace for you Family Guy fans out there.
(3) Deploying versus only enacting might represent a symmetry which is broken by memetic debt, i.e., one risks memetic debt in the former but not the latter. It is a similar symmetry breaking that I am positing to distinguish between alliance memes and immunomemes, i.e., in the former case the deploying agent, the person taking the action, making the offer, is paid back, gets their memetic resonance, gets their reward, has their offer accepted, while in the latter case they are not paid back, they are spanked, their offer is blocked or rejected, and they are saddled with (residual) memetic debt.
(4) Sorry for the gross reference but attention vampires really piss me off and I think they are really pathetic and there's no point trying to "put a Band-Aid" on their behavior.
(5) I've been working on the idea that residual memetic debt (RMD) is the cause of intergenerational abuse and also intergenerational genocide and such. If so, then we have to understand whether RMD can be "paid back" or if there is some other avenue which must be pursued in order to drain it off. I don't really have a verb picked out for "draining" RMD, like "to resolve" or "to drain" or "to pay back" and since I can't claim to know whether this is even really possible (in theory yes, but I have not conducted a lot of experiments on this yet) choosing a name for the phenomenon might be putting Descartes before the horse. This may point to a treatment of (some forms of) PTSD.
(6) Also "emotional vampire" and others.
(7) A memetic loop is opened when one deploys a meme, and memetic debt is incurred. If the meme resolves successfully, resulting in the system transitioning to a state favorable to the deployer (and their allies) then this memetic debt is "paid back" and the deployer enjoys memetic resonance, memetic reward. If the loop is NOT closed, the deployer is the victim of an immunomeme, and the system is diverted to a disfavorable state, then the deployer is stuck with residual memetic debt.
(8) More needs to be written on this, and examples and notation explored. Intergenerational abuse in the form of "mommy hits me but I can't hit mommy, so I have to wait until I'm big and have my own kids, then I can do the hitting and somebody else can experience being hit (by me)." I need to expand this with more and better examples and a more rigorous definitions. There may be concepts as a "looped pair" of memes or something. This probably relates closely to what resonance looks like. Obviously it has to do with transition to a favorable memetic state, but I need to drag in more factors, independent of the topology of the memetic matrix, that identify an unclosed loop, or a blocked memetic deployment.
(9) Residual memetic debt in terms of the laws of macromemetics and immunomemetics, and notation and matrix transitions. And also examples. I may need to do a third installment of the Dining Philosophers.
No comments:
Post a Comment