Before anyone can say, ‘Cleon you are not a meme expert’, I have already quoted a meme. This meme first originated on an internet forum I frequent, where someone was deriding someone for not being an expert on a certain game. With lightning speed, within the next post, someone had quoted him as not being an expert expert, and the next few pages consisted only of alterations of the original quote, with users accusing each other of not being an expert on a certain topic. This is how fast a meme can form, with mere seconds, and the replication of it very soon after.
Something I regularly use in my speech and conversation in daily life, are internet memes. Like a metaphor for diseases, I ‘caught’ them from the internet, from another ‘infected’ person and have begun to imitate them myself in verbal usage. Like a disease trying to invade an immune person’s system, a meme has to adapt itself to bypass the infectee’s defenses, to ‘infect’ him and get him to spread it himself. Why I got infected in the first place, or rather chose to, and spread it myself? Because I found that meme funny/amusing/imitable. To that immune person, it might not be so, and thus the meme has to evolve, change itself to appeal to that person, so that it might continue spreading. We are the vessel for its propagation, not unlike a viral strain.
Even this metaphor I’ve used, this meme, was imitated as I find out after having typed out the above paragraph while watching the Dan Dennet video on TED. Richard Dawkins had used this exact same virus-meme metaphor in his book, The Selfish Gene in 1976, in an era I was not even born yet. That is how prevalent some memes are, that they can spread through generations and unintentionally find their way into the minds of the ignorant.
As for Susan Blackmore’s take on memes, and subsequently techno-memes, or ‘temes’, the logical extreme I can see it being to, has already been shown in a certain movie series. Skynet from the Terminator series, to quote Wikipedia, is “an artificially intelligent system which became self aware and revolted against its creators.” It revolted against the humans, its creators, as it deemed them unfit to rule, being an inferior species. It constantly updates itself, and improves, as do humans, ‘replicating’ them in a way, but at a much faster and efficient pace. This would be the most I can see a teme taking itself to, surviving, even ruling a world where humans are not needed anymore.
Blackmore feels that we are already quite close to her vision of a teme, which would be a machine that can replicate memes on its own, disowning the need for a human vessel. To me though, a teme would be nothing more than a meme that some computer has come up with instead of a human. As she said in the video, we're not quite there yet, so it will be when we've created a computer that can simulate a human’s brain functions on a scale well enough to come up with a meme on its own. However, if it is a piece of technology mimicking the process of the human mind, then we can foresee it as something we should have been able to come up with ourselves, given enough time to take into account the speed at which a computer can "think" versus a human. So to me it doesn't seem like that would be a teme at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment