A war for mind share is going on around us. Ideas struggle for territory in our
brains. In the last part of Meme Wars we consider
how on science and commerce are effected by battles between memes for minds.
Market Memes
 |
| Commercial memes spread through advertising everywhere on the planet |
Business uses branding to create demand for their
products. Branding is a type of meme
associated with a product or service.
Images, words, and feelings are generated in the brain by the meme that meet
needs, create desires, or inspire lust.
Advertising is the art of creating thoughts in human minds. Advertising, when effective, generates and propagate
memes, that reproducing in people’s minds.
Adapting to new meme reproduction methods, advertising has
begun to shift meme creation and reproduction strategies to internet, social
media, and other information technologies.
This revolution in meme reproduction has disturbed
centralized broadcast replication. Print
media is struggling for access to mind share with web pages. YouTube is capturing eyeballs once controlled
by network television.
Advertisers have long known that younger minds are more
receptive to new memes. Humans now spend
three
billion hours each week playing video games. These gamers are largely younger minds. In order to circulate their memes, business
must learn means of reproduction inside these media.
 |
| Even in the poorest of societies, pervasive commercial memes are hard to ignore |
Immunity
Global consumer business has boomed by being successful and
spreading memes. The poorest countries
in the world know what Coca Cola is.
Nike’s meme of “Just Do It” is in most of the planets brains.
Entertainment media uses meme’s sexuality to grab our
attention so that businesses can place their ideas in our brains and associate
them with the other attractions.
Sporting events that grab us emotionally are used in similar manners to
allow more receptive brains to get meme’s about automobiles. Demand is thrust upon us unaware.
Commercial memes are intentionally crafted and delivered to avoid our mental immune systems. There economic success depends upon meme-crafter's ability to do circumvent our minds immunity.
Opinion Makers
On a more strategic level, owners of businesses try to
convince get us to act in their best interest by creating memes that distract
us. Pointing to people and branding them
as lazy, leeches on society, and “takers”, memes can cause us to act in ways
that are not beneficial to us. Driving
down expectations for compassion while driving up anger and fear, these memes
warp our view of reality.
 |
| Non-compassionate meme generator |
Shell Oil has tried to cast
itself as caring and for good, while destroying thousands of livelihoods. Wal-Mart convinces that lower prices are most
important for consumers while Main
Street dies and wages plummet. Goldman Sachs did
severe damage to the world economy in the 2007 financial collapse yet
advertises on public television for how they build small business.
News networks and online media build and circulate memes
that tear at the fabric of society.
Belittling their opponents with personal attacks, bad memes about
government, economy and society are allowed access to unwary minds.
Appealing to frustrations and remapping it onto their own
desires, meme crafters shift public opinion.
Calling public
servants useless, they devalue our ability to help each other. Politics devolves to personal attacks, civil
debate disappears, and solution finding becomes nonexistent as memes wage war
in peoples minds.
We have yet to build meme immunity systems that will allow
us to keep such bad ideas out of our minds.
Until we do, bad ideas will reproduce and cause havoc.
Religion and Science
A meme war between science and religion is being waged in
brains. Religious memes have a huge “head
start” on scientific ones.
 |
| Science and religion engage in a meme war |
Around the planet, religion is taught to us when we are very
young. Science is kept from developing
minds until much later. Religious stories
enter our brains while they are still forming.
Most western society’s children know of Noah, Adam and Eve, and
Christmas before they know of numbers, letters, or discovery methods.
Most religious people acknowledge that other faiths have “bad
ideas”. Immunity memes against other religious
beliefs are placed in children’s minds early on, thus barriers for science
memes are also set high.
Some memes are more complex and complicated than
others. Complex memes require more time
and space in minds to reproduce than simple ones. Entrenched complex memes are much more successful
at holding onto minds.
The new information technology is allowing education to be
individually tailored. Home
schooling, especially for religious people, surges in western cultures. This permits minds to form without common
concepts. Science memes that were delivered
in public schools not long ago are allowed to die out.
Science tends more toward facts and religion tends more toward faith. In the meme war between them, science will continue to press that advantage. Will it be enough to overcome early indoctrination by religion into young minds? Perhaps science needs to shift it's memes to the battlefield of younger minds?
Conclusions
There is a war of ideas struggling to control our brains and
thereby our actions.
By examining previous meme wars, we can learn more about
those ideological struggles in our own time.
Ideas replicate in human minds in ways similar to biological
systems. New technologies alter how meme’s
reproduce. Our current communication technology
is accelerating and focusing meme reproduction.
 |
| Meme wars may never end. |
Good ideas (facts) do not always win over bad ideas (myths). Memes are engaged in an ongoing struggle for
supremacy.
Memes can develop immunity to other ideas. Some memes can stop the entry of other memes
into brains.
There are too many ideas for any brain to handle, so we
specialize and move toward familiarity memes. We also are trending toward
simpler, easier to mentally digest memes and trending away from complex, subtle
ones.
Business, religion, governments, and media create memes
intentionally. We are usually unaware of
their existence. They can and do cause
us to act against our own interests
Conflicts of ideas occur in our brains regularly. We need to become aware of these conflicts
and build our own immune systems.
We can build better minds by expending effort to allow
complex memes to enter our brains. Resisting
the simple, we must learn to think more deeply to avoid bad memes.
Crafting memes is a relatively new idea itself. Like DNA, words and pictures are the tools
that we can use to build memes.
Technology is providing us with powerful ways to reproduce memes.
In this new revolutions, each of us as individuals
can and should engage in the meme wars.
Please subscribe to this blog, so I can put more of my memes in your head!
No comments:
Post a Comment