We Are Cyborgs (Part 1)

I have already become a cyborg.  So have you.  What will it mean to live a life when the  word ‘human’ no longer applies?  

There are many ways to think about cyborgs.  Some think of science fiction creatures like the Borg in Star Trek.  Older folks may remember the Six Million Dollar Man television program where a broken man was re-engineered into something stronger.  Even Luke Skywalker had a prosthetic arm allowing him to be a cyborg like his father Darth Vader.

When we add systems to our bodies and then become dependent upon them we become cyborgs.  Recent research has shown that when we use tools regularly, they become extensions of our brain, even if not “hard wired” into our nervous systems.  Our minds begin to identify the tools as a part of the body.

Egyptian prosthetic toe

When the body gets input from a tool being used, the brain adapts to that tool creating a feedback loop.  It is not enough to have a tool; it is the feedback to change the brains behavior, the very structure of the brains neurons, which identifies a tool as a cyborg enhancement.

According to the research, rather than being thought of only as an extension of our bodies, our gadgets have become tangible, functional substitutes for our bodies.

Early Cyborgs

The ancient Egyptians created the first primitive cyborgs by creating prosthetic to replace a lost body parts.  These replacement toes became apart of the persons stride when walking.

War has brought great advances to the creation of artificial body parts to extend lost limbs.  

Wounded veterans become cyborgs

The prosthetics industry was born after the U.S. Civil War when tens of thousands of wounded required peg legs and artificial arms.

The recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have advanced cyborg technology even further.  

With real like skin coverings, mechanical arms now sense micro-movements in skin and muscle to aid amputees in performing everyday tasks.  

Covered by high tech composite materials, it even becomes difficult to know a person is using cyborg technology.

The next looming generation of cyborg technology is already here.  Hardwired prosthetics connect directly to the nervous system bypassing muscle and skin.  

Already working in the lab and in test subjects, this new level of body integration is creating humans that are not all human anymore.

You are a Cyborg

You may already have prosthetics attached to your body. Anyone with a filling, crown or implanted tooth has augmented their body.  This dental technology changes the way you are able to ingest food.  Dental work enhances the performance of your mouth to chew.  

Once you start using dental tools like this, your body adapts to new behavior patterns.  It takes only a few days for the brain and body to accept dental implants as a part of the body itself.

Wired directly into the
nervous system

In the past few moments, your hand was probably on a mouse or touch screen.  These devices are also cyborg enhancements.  

Scrolling the mouse wheel or sweeping the screen with your finger are the mechanical means by which your brain is augment by feed back loop technology.  

We must admit that our brain has changed its very structure to adapt to these tools.  The feedback loops between muscle, brain and sight connect us creating a new kind of cyborg organism.

If you watch a child playing a video game, they are totally integrated into the controller and television.  The controller is a connected part of their body as they get sight and sound feedback.  

You can watch them lean and tilt there heads to the experience.  They have strong emotional responses when playing.  A feeling of loss occurs when they cannot play.  When the connection with their cyborg tool is broken, their brains suffer.  Clearly these tools are tied directly into their minds allowing them to become temporarily cyborgs.

Do you have any cyborg teeth?

Sports are also engaged in the technological enhancement of human beings.  From runners with new strap on feet to human growth hormone doping, our athletic competitions are augmenting what it means to compete.  

Strictly speaking, doping is not a cyborg technology because it does not provide a feedback loop.  It is, however, leading us in a direction of manipulating our bodies on a cellular level to augment our natural physical ability.

Human hearts are enhanced with pacemakers.  Diabetics have insulin pumps.  Artificial kidneys keep people alive.  Contact lenses and even hearing aids augment our bodies allowing us to become more than we are as biology.

In We Are Cyborgs (part 2) we examine where cyborg technology is going and speculate on its consequences to being human.

The U.S. is a Socialist State!

 Several people have told me over the past year of their belief that the United States is becoming a socialist country. 

Many believe Obama is a socialist

Pundits on radio and television proclaim that we are redistributing wealth through taxes from rich to poor.  Claiming liberty is under threat, it is said we are losing our capitalism and becoming a socialistic country.  

Sean Hannity and Sarah Palin seem to take this for granted.  Rush Limbaugh preaches that a socialist trend will bring the country down.  On the political right, the national move toward socialism is taken as a goal of the political left.

There are two basic themes being espoused.  One is that the United States is socialist already.  The other is that the United States is becoming socialist.

Let us examine some data to see if these claims are warranted.

What is Socialism?

Socialist countries try to achieve and maintain an even balance between the poorest and richest citizens.  One of the major aims of socialism is to ensure that people are economically equal.   Non-socialist countries will have very rich and very poor segments, where wealth and income are distributed unevenly.

A common thought

Socialism in its purest form is an economic system where a collective of people or government owns the means of production and distribution.  

In pure socialism there is no private property.  In pure socialism everyone shares the benefits of property equally.  

Pure socialism has never been achieved by a modern nation state.  Some level capitalism has always been allowed.

There are degrees of socialism. 

Some real-life socialist-like states have their government planning their economies, allowing businesses to operate for profit under close supervision.  Countries like Cuba, North Korea and Burma practice this form of socialism. 

Other real-life socialist like states allow workers to share control of businesses with owners.  India and Germany have variations of this form of socialism.  Where implemented carefully and thoughtfully these kinds of economies thrive.

Lastly are those countries with market socialism.  Nationalized businesses compete within a market, returning the profits to the state.  China’s recent economic boom has occurred using this form of socialism.

Distribution of Income

If we divide citizens into five groups (quin-tiles) and look at their annual income the difference between the richest fifth and the poorest fifth in socialistic nation would be small.

Current income distribution in the United States

With a little reflection, most people realize this is not the case for the United States.  When asked to estimate the balance of incomes, most citizens predicted that there was a significant imbalance between rich and poor.

When asked what their ideal balance was, citizens thought in general terms that the rich should stay rich, but not so rich.  They also thought poor people needed to earn more of the income pie.

The actual distribution of incomes is much different than expected in the survey.  

The wealthiest have significantly more annual income than the average citizen expected.  

The very poorest are much worse off than citizens thought, estimated or considered ideal.

The current distribution of income among citizens of the United States is very clearly not showing signs of socialism today.  To the contrary, in terms of income distribution the United States is not a socialist nation.

Distribution of wealth and assets
in the United States

Control of Wealth

In socialism the government or collectives of citizens control the wealth of the land.  If this is true we would see an even distribution of wealth between citizens.  The facts indicate otherwise.

One percent of the population controls 43% of the total wealth of the nation.

The bottom 80% of the population controls only 7% of the nation’s wealth.

Clearly property and money are not being redistributed to the poor in any large scale.  Rather, we see a very few people owning most of the riches.

The current distribution of wealth among citizens of the United States is very clearly not showing signs of socialism today.  To the contrary, in terms of wealth ownership the United States is not socialist today.

Income Trends

If the United States is trending toward socialism, then we would see data that showed the poorest citizens having gains in income while the richest citizens lost it.

If we examine data from 1963, before the liberal Lyndon Johnson became president and started the Great Society program, and compare it with income distribution in 2009, when the results of George W. Bush’s economic policies were in full effect, what shall we see?

During this time frame, there has been a surge in the number of citizens who are making less income and plunge in the number of citizens who are making more.  

Fewer and fewer people are earning good incomes.  More and more people are earning poor incomes.

  

If we examine the over all trend in incomes during this period, we discover that we are moving farther and father away from a socialist economy.  

In 1963, the United States was much closer to a socialist balance of incomes than it was in 2009. 

During this forty year period, the economic balance has shifted drastically away from the poor to the rich.

While the number of people who are earning good incomes is dropping, the amount of income being earned by the rich is steadily rising.

The current trend for wealth and incomes among citizens of the United States is very clearly not showing signs of trending toward socialism.  To the contrary, the United States has been becoming less socialist as time passes.

Unions and Government

If the United States was becoming socialistic, then unions of labor would be gaining power.  

Data from 1948 until 2008 shows a different trend.  Labor unions, including government and private sector unions, have dropped to less than half of their peak rate during Harry Truman’s liberal administration.

If the United States was trying to redistribute wealth, we would not see a dramatic fall in federal taxation on the rich.  In socialism, the rich are taxed heavily to support the poor.

When looking at tax revenues by source, we see a dramatic rise in taxes on payroll income.  This represents and increase in the taxation of labor.

Meanwhile, taxes on corporate revenue fallen significantly.  Businesses are given greater access to capital by reduced tax rates.

The individual tax rate is applied on money not earned by labor.   The individual tax rate includes things like inheritance taxes, stocks profits, dividends, and interest income.  The individual tax rate has remained fairly consistent.  Taxes on wealth not earned by labor have remained flat.

The current trend for government and labor in the United States is very clearly not showing signs of trending toward socialism.  To the contrary, the United States has been becoming less socialist over time.

  

Ignorance or Lies?

Clearly the facts show that the United States is NOT BECOMING SOCIALIST.  It is in fact becoming less socialist.

So why are people saying we are becoming socialist?  I will not venture to guess at their motives here, perhaps in another post.  I will suggest a course of action for we the listeners.

Those who ARE saying that the United States is becoming socialist are either ignorant of the facts or intentionally lying.

When a pundit does not know the facts, they should not be speaking about the issue.  Ignorance is not a qualification for expertise.  Listening to ignorance will only breed ignorance.   Continuing to listen to the opinions’ of ignorant speakers is a foolish thing to do.

When a pundit does know the facts and deliberately lies about them, they have broken trust and should not be listened to.  Audiences should ignore them until they leave or change their ways.  Listening to someone who lies to you is a foolish thing to do.

Limbaugh, Palin, Hannity, and others who spout that the United States is currently socialist or becoming socialist are either uninformed or telling falsehoods.  Either way, wisdom suggests, we should stop listening to them.

What do YOU know?

There are a lot of things we could know. Our brains are very small. Can we know it all? Can we even get close? Should we ever stop trying?

Colossal Knowledge

The latest guess is there are about 9,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (twenty-one zeros) stars in the universe.  Our brains contain about 100,000,000,000 (eleven zeros) individual memory cells.  We can not even dedicate one brain cell to each trillion stars.  The amount of information in the universe overwhelms even our ability to understand it.

In a grain of sand, there are roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000 (sixteen zeros) atoms.  Our brains do not even have the capacity know about all the atoms in a single grain of sand.  

Lucky then for us there appear to be patterns in the universe.  More accurately, our brains think they observe patterns in the vastness. 

Assuming the patterns repeat, we make mental models that help us clutch at the unknowable.

Thinking all stars are similar we can put our minds around the idea of how stellar processes work.

Judging all atoms by patterns, we consider we have understanding about grains of sand.

We humans have horded knowledge using our patterns.  Each of us knows a little.  Our brains each holding pieces of knowledge about the universe.  Combing the knowledge in all our brains together, we know much more.  Even the total sum of human knowledge no way approaches all that could be known.  It may never.

Knowledge and Fiction

We can never know a thing itself.  We can only sense it remotely.  I do not know what it is to be a baseball.  I am not a baseball, nor will I ever be one. I can never really know the baseball.  Making assumptions based on patterns, I understand enough things about the baseball to make it useful in my existence.

Truth, what actually is, exists externally to our minds.  Patterns in our brains allow us to have beliefs about what truth is.  Our beliefs, when true, are knowledge.

We learn many patterns, some we know to be false, while others fit the facts.  We combine fact and false together to make stories.  I know many facts about Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.  The Star Wars universe does not exist in reality.  These characters are fiction patterns in my brain.

Sometimes our beliefs are factual and we have knowledge.  Sometimes our beliefs are not accurate and fiction.  Truth and facts are not always the same.  I, and I bet you too, often confuse the two in our daily thoughts. 

Mixing truth and fact, our mental patterns help us cope with our lives.  The external reality sometimes shows me that patterns I believe are false. 

Understanding that I often have non-factional beliefs, I have created a pattern in my brain that constantly forces me to question my knowledge.  Doubt allows new information to become knowledge.  Lack of doubt keeps new knowledge away.  Humility before the universe is how the we come to know it.

People who have dogmatic beliefs are often unable to transcend their false patterns.  Limiting their minds to new facts, they exist in worlds of fiction.

Learning

From birth, our families and the world around us start forming patterns of belief in our brains.  By the time we hit grade school, many structures of thought have already formed.

As we progress from grade school through higher education we learn more.  Some of us stop at high school and begin our lives as adults.  We stop learning general things and begin to specialize.

College focuses our gathering of knowledge in specific directions.  We absorb input from books and teachers that takes us in direction of career or interest.  Adding to our storehouse of knowledge, our mental patterns become more complex.

Those who go on to higher degrees specialize further, narrowing their focus and traveling farther to the edge of human knowledge. 

Some few of us, will attempt to push the boundaries of human knowledge, earning doctorates or P.H.D.s (know by many as “Piled Higher and Deeper”).

Countless numbers of humans stop learning beyond the basics as they go about our adult lives.  On average we Americans read a hundred books in our life times.  While a few read thousands of books, almost 25% of us read none after high school.  The books we do read are largely fiction and do not add to our patterns of knowledge.

Reading books, of course, is not the only way of learning, but the data suggest, most of us are content to remain with limited knowledge about the universe we live in.

Personally, I have trouble imagining a life, where each day does not push the boundary of patterns of knowledge.  I hope you continue to push the boundaries of yours.

Meme Wars (Part 7)

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.

Meme Wars: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  - Part 4 - Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

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 Avoidance

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.

Meme Wars: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  - Part 4 - Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

Please subscribe to this blog, so I can put more of my memes in your head!

Meme Wars (Part 6)

A war for mind share is going on around us.  Ideas struggle for territory in our brains.  In Part 6 of Meme Wars we consider political and social effects of a new meme landscape and I advocate becoming involved in the war between memes.

Meme Wars: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  - Part 4 - Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

Memes in a mind battle for control

Meme Wars

Good ideas are struggling with bad ideas for supremacy in the minds of writers and their readers.  Conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives are warring upon one another with ideas profane and sane.

All over the world established orders of power are being threatened by communications through new technologies. 

Dictators, like kings before them, struggle to maintain their power bases as common women and men gain access to new ideas.

States that prevent the new communications are being left behind scientifically, culturally, and economically.

Arab Spring

In Egypt, Libya, Syria, Morocco and other places we witness a revolutionary wave of protests threatening authoritarian power structures.  Traditional conservative order is being confronted by new progressive, liberal masses.  A wave of democratic revolution is sweeping northern Africa and the Middle East.  Using civil resistance or out right warfare, common people are overthrowing centralized power and trying to institute more democratic forms of social order.

These revolutions are highly enabled by new communication technologies.  Individuals are able to broadcast to each other, bypassing centralized and controlled broadcast technologies.

A parallel to medieval Europe’s revolutions is not difficult to see.  Information has become more widely available and more easily transferred between people.  What was before hidden or secret is now open and shared.

By speaking with each other directly, it is now possible for individuals to group together in ways that were impossible before. 

Social media is a breeding ground
for meme reproduction

As libraries in the renaissance made information widely available, the internet has made meme transmission and reproduction highly fluid.  Like water, memes flow into open minds.

Not all progressive is good.  Some nations or groups of people want to return to medieval social orders, thinking their sacred texts or Sharia should become law of the land.  Entrenched hatred between tribal groups is causing some lands to experience genocide. 

The communication technology is neutral.  As with previous information revolutions, bad ideas and good ideas compete in people’s minds.

It took Europe centuries to work out the effects of printing presses upon their societies.  Conflicts raged back and forth with one side winning and then losing and then winning again. 

We should expect nothing different in our current turmoil, brought on by these new set of information technologies.  New stable systems of order will not appear overnight.  The first change will not be the last change enabled by new technologies.  Sometimes things will go backward before moving forwards.

There are peaceful ways to engage
in meme warfare

Taking Sides in Meme Wars

Meme’s that are factual have a slight edge on those that are not.  Reality will intrude upon ideas.  Facts do not always win in battles between memes.  Events in physical reality will be driven by struggles between ideas.

Bad ideas that take root in minds and are spread widely can lead to disastrous consequences.  The Taliban’s treatment of women, suppression of free thought in Iran, and genocide in Rwanda are examples of bad meme’s spreading resulting in  harm.

External minds have a role to play in internal conflicts between memes.  Deciding which ideas we wish to support and those which we wish to combat is necessary for coordinated action. 

More stable societies may be able help those in turmoil by supporting positive memes. Engaging in meme warfare for minds will happen.  To fail to become involved will allow memes that threaten us to prosper.  While violence may sometimes be necessary, the larger battle front is in the minds of humans. 

Powerful change can be made in the world by crafting and reproducing memes that change minds.  Meme creators should be aware of how memes conflict and reproduce inside human brains.  Crafting ideas that will overcome immune systems, take root, then reproduce is necessary in order to wage war upon memes.

In part 7 of Meme Wars we effects of a new meme landscape on science and commerce.

Meme Wars: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  - Part 4 - Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

Meme Wars (Part 5)

A war for mind share is going on around us.  Ideas struggle for territory in our brains.  In Part 5 of Meme Wars we consider current technologies enabling memes to struggle for mind share.

Meme Wars: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  - Part 4 - Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

Like the bodies immune system, meme's protect themselves
(click for video)

Meme Immunity

As when specialization happened during Renaissance meme reproduction, we are now specializing by ideology and familiarity.  Like attracts like and we form into reading and writing communities.  Our minds are attracted to our desires and prejudices.  Individuals now filter which information streams they will allow to reproduce memes in their brains.

Many people are limiting meme reproduction by only speaking and listening to those they know in a physical world.  Friends on Facebook and Google are allowed into our streams of consciousness because we already are familiar with them.  We visit websites that contain information we want to read and ignore those with voices that could change our minds.

Most minds have memes which are developing an immune system like structure to protect our brains from ideas that could threaten or change us.  Like white blood cells, our brain's memes attacks ideas that are unfamiliar or disliked.  We reinforce these meme’s by reproducing them in posts, blogs, and texts.

Death of Thought?

Pictures of cute pets and single sentence sentiments are plentiful.  Our ability to write and be read so quickly and easily is allowing the most base of human thought to bubble to the surface.

Memes that are winning the battle for mind share?

Complex thoughts are being reduced, over simplified and shared widely.  Effortless, emotional appeals are trumping thoughtful logic and considered thought.  Our information flow is so fast and furious that factual knowledge is being reduced to absurdity, being lost in a stream of silliness.

More dangerous, perhaps, is the tendency toward verbal violence and extreme speech.  Ridicule has become a standard means of communication.  Cruel one-liners are replacing patient understanding. True dialog to understand one another dissolves into shouting matches.  We seem in many circles to be devolving into name-calling ideologues.

Ideas that require more than one sentence or single picture are being lost in the shuffle by our new filters.  With so much information, minds trend toward easy to digest bits of information.  Our capacity for deep, introspective thought is giving way to shallow, surface communication.

At the same time our minds are being bombarded by memes desiring reproduction, we are filtering all but simple, short ones out.  Complex ideas which can not be reduced to sentiment are losing in this fight for mind share.  Our meme immune systems must develop more complexity in order for us to regain control of our own minds.  If we do not we may reduce ourselves to absurdity.

In part 6 of Meme Wars we explore political and social effects of a new meme landscape.

Meme Wars: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  - Part 4 - Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

Meme Wars (Part 4)

 A war for mind share is going on around us.  Ideas struggle for territory in our brains.  In Part 4 of Meme Wars we consider current technologies enabling memes to struggle for mind share.

Meme Wars: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  - Part 4 - Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

Global internet map of connections between minds

American Information Revolution

Microprocessors, internet and social media technologies combined representing a new revolution in communications.  Effects of this technology, like printing of books, is radically transforming what it means to be human.

First with personal computers, expanded by internet, and then democratized by smart phones; we have destroyed distance and time as barriers to communication.  No longer do we have one way communication from a far-off past.  We speak and listen, almost exclusively in the now, everywhere.

Memes are forming from minds to machines and be transferred to previously unreachable brains.  Meme reproduction between minds has accelerated out of the ability for anyone to control.

With a revolution of book printing, thoughts of minds from a distant and formerly unknown past were broadcast far and wide.  Printer’s who owned presses had enormous power to choose which ideas were disseminated.  Moving from writing centers to reading edges, thoughts moved in one direction. 

This printing broadcast technology provided a means for church, king or others to control information.  Broadcasting allows filtering of memes prior to reproduction.

Writing ones thoughts can now be transferred to readers instantly by practically anyone with minimal economic stability.  Memes move about at the speed of light, reproducing uncontrolled.  We write our posts, send our tweets, share our links providing near instant communication.

Brains are connecting everywhere

Today we each can be broadcasters, speaking with anyone connected via novel technologies across the entire planet.  Our generation’s information technology revolution is about multi-point communications.  A chaotic and almost uncontrollable density of thought is transferred between brains.

People funnel ideas

Meme Overload

Readers have unprecedented access to others thoughts.  Like readers of the first printed Bibles, we are seeing new things for the first time and forming opinions quickly and easily.

We are overwhelmed with information.  There is more information on Facebook, Google+, or LinkedIn published in a day, than we can read in a lifetime.  We are forced to select which information streams we read, letting others go by unknown. 

With only limited space in our brains and time to process ideas, we are forced to create our own filters to stop the flood from overwhelming us.  Where centralized broadcast allowed filtering to happen for us, we now must do the filtering for ourselves.

These filters are not new, we have always tried to stay away from ideas we consider harmful.  As our bodies avoid disease and bad behaviors, our minds stay away from ideas that could infect us or lead to bad action.

In part 5 of Meme Wars we continue our journey into our current information revolution.

Meme Wars: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  - Part 4 - Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7