I apologize in advance for the incoherent nature of this blogpost, this is more me just dropping my thoughts down on the internet rather than an actually thought-out post simply because of how abstract the concepts posted here are and how hard it is to express them properly.
Before I get into the details of meme anthropology, I shall ask a set of questions that led me to the idea.
- What can become a meme?
- In what way are memes created and spread?
- Is there a mathematical model on which we can roughly predict the spread of memes?
- How does culture and society affect memes?
- How does memes affect culture and society?
- Do certain cultures have a predisposition to memes?
- How are memes handled and created in other cultures and countries?
- How did memes relate to the development of a culture?
- How does memes affect the human mind?
- Can certain behaviors be caused through memes?
Essentially, memetic anthropology is my attempt to answer those questions along with being a way of analyzing human behavior and development like other forms of anthropology. It is the study, documentation, and interpretation of memes across the world from multiple countries and cultures.
Obviously I don’t have the funding, resources, data or skill to feasibly get close to answering these questions, and honestly some of these questions are so abstract it’s basically impossible to answer them, but the concept of memetic anthropology I believe is a novel one that could be an interesting take on general anthropology.
…..
The internet is home to over 3.5 billion people, nearly half the world’s population. So what do they do on the internet? What memes do they post, what content to they create? That is a question that I’ve always wondered about. Other countries have radically different cultures so their idea of a meme might be completely different and original compared to ours. Maybe the way memes spread in their country is vastly different compared to ours. One of my stranger longings is to understand every language in the world just so I could browse every country’s websites and see what memes they have to offer.
A horrific idea I have is the possibility of controlling human behavior through memes. Obviously this has been attempted many times through propaganda and cultural conditioning, but humanity seems to have a particularly visceral reaction to memes. I believe this is because of the deceptive simplicity of the meme, it doesn’t have complex sentences as textbooks and speeches do, it simply expresses the essence of an idea in the most basic way possible. Something that throws us back to our Savannah days where one must make a decision or communicate in the most basic way possible. It allows us to react without any thought, to gain an understanding or relate without any complexity or work. You see, memes are the most basic form of communication, almost like the cavemen pictographs of ages long past. They distill a complex thought into its core essence, into something that’s so easy to consume that even the most daft individual can understand it. Not only that but they are so simple yet trustworthy that they can be the perfect distraction to reality if done right, essentially bloat the internet with so many falsehoods concealed in the form of memes that the truth is impossible popularize—unless it distilled into meme format itself. A time when people are wrapped in such a thick cocoon of irony, apathy and memes that they simply don’t care about anything at all, a time when information suppression becomes pointless because nobody cares that they are oppressed. Think Brave New World but powered by memes. To venture even further into cyberpunk dystopia territory, what if someone discovered how memes affect the human mind so perfectly that they could transmit subliminal messages through memes to affect a human’s thought process on a subconscious level? To literally brainwash people without them even knowing it? Hell what if memes could create a subconscious “trigger” to do something. For example, what if a man was exposed to memes that caused him to subconsciously think “I blow up [insert target here] on the trigger of [insert ‘detonator meme’ here]” so he doesn’t even know what’s going on until it’s too late? Obviously that scenario is a bit far fetched but the idea of memetic population control is very much a terrifying reality. The freakish truth is that memes and the internet in general have the power to make concepts such as privacy, freedom, free-will and truth completely obsolete! The most scary part? People are already doing a basic form of it! The NSA and corporations mass collect your data and create ads based on your preferences through computer algorithms, and these algorithms have become frighteningly accurate. For example, in one case a marketing algorithm was able to successfully predict that someone was pregnant and send baby-stuff based ads to them before the parents of the pregnant individual was able to realize it by analyzing her shopping and browsing patterns (don’t believe me? have some sources! http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/#54618c2e34c6 and http://www.businessinsider.com/the-incredible-story-of-how-target-exposed-a-teen-girls-pregnancy-2012-2) What if corporations and governments take this to the logical extreme and start “planting” subconscious seeds into people through ads or memes? What if the collective will of the people can be toyed with by something as simple as a meme?
Crap I think I digressed way to far. Eh whatever.
The Patrician Plebeian 