That Mind Virus Wants to Suck the Attention Out of Your Brain But Has to Call Itself a Meme Before You'll Let it Do That

If I remember correctly, when Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" he was not thinking about Facebook. Dawkins was trying to find a way to describe the cultural equivalent of a gene as a way to talk about practices that become a part of a culture. He thought it might add a little formality to the notion of social evolution as companion to species evolution, the mutation of memes changing peoples and cultures in the same way that the mutation of genes changes species. Practices that spread, like democracy and blue jeans, are memes. It's a great idea, and meme itself has become an incredibly pervasive meme. It's also radically mutated to look a bit like a virus.

Now, every bright shiny object on the Internet has become a meme. Or at least it gets called that. Of course a video of the world's smallest monkey eating elbow macaroni does capture consciousness, just like the Bill of Rights or the idea that we ought to drive on the right side of the road. But it doesn't actually inform behavior, doing less to inform who we are than distract us from that. Instead, it's just a distraction, a way to transform consciousness  into page views (which, in turn, can be transformed into advertising revenues). 

Consciousness is under assault. It's odd. Never before has humanity been more free to live as they wish and yet never before has the world offered so many alluring enticements from one's own thoughts, making it difficult for the individual to define novel ways to live. From movies and TV shows to books, art, museums, and lectures, the world offers thousands of options for structuring our consciousness for us, even outside of work. Worse, many of these same memes can become viruses, not so much structuring consciousness as distracting it. 

But I digress. To be distracted is to be human in this Information Age. We all do it. Trust me that I daily exceed the average quota of things found fascinating. But the notion that we're being distracted by something as sexy as a meme is a form of self-delusion. These aren't memes: they're badly mutated versions of Dawkins' original meme, something more akin to a mind virus than gene. I'm not suggesting that we stop being amused, intrigued, shocked, and entertained; I just that we owe it to ourselves to properly label the sources of all that.

[This blogger will leave you to determine if the preceding rant was a public service announcement, something akin to a meme, or was itself a mind virus, the blogging equivalent of a onomatopoeia.]

BZZT - 21st Century Media

Concision has won.

If you are not concise, you can't be heard. There are 6 billion people on this planet and you can't expect to hold anyone's attention for more than about 30 seconds (oops - there goes another reader - already I've used too many words, taken too long to make my point).

BZZT

Couple the information age with globalization and suddenly we have so many sources to check for so many stories that we simply haven't the time to explore things in depth. We'd finish the book we're reading but we have a coffee date at Barnes & Noble and while we're there we'll likely pick up a new book or magazine.

BZZT

Even when we're stuck in traffic, we have this frenetic vibe that comes from too much caffeine and content. We're a nation of channel surfers, web surfers, replacing quiet Sufi wisdom with noisy surfer info, working our way down the food chain from wisdom to understanding to knowledge to information to data as we find ourselves less and less able to find patterns in the haystack, the do-it yourself worldview with easy-to-assemble instructions now in pieces in the floor, us with no instructions, and a sense that we'll never figure out how it all fits together.

BZZT

Something big is happening, likely, but we haven't time to sort it out. Instead we play an increasingly difficult game of keeping up with data streams, emails, instant messaging, phone calls, news feeds. We're living in an age where information has displaced understanding. We all speculate and when we're tired of listening to ourselves, we have hundreds and thousands of options from which to choose for professional speculation.

BZZT

Universities and think tanks and research labs are full of highly intelligent people who speak too slowly, who consider too many variables, who talk in careful and nuanced tones that make them undesirable for the ratings whores who've kidnapped our media. When a signal is pulled out of the noise, it all takes too long to explain.

BZZT

Our media was never designed to convey understanding anyway. It was designed to hold our attention between commercials, open up our minds to messages that look alluring before suddenly switching us from news about our finances to promises to cure erectile dysfunction, getting us just when we’re vulnerable and open to new information. The content is there just to soften us up, so to speak. It was never meant to be taken seriously.

BZZT

Already I've taken too long. Already I've said too much. Already, 83.2% of the readers who began this posting have clicked through to another site, one better geared to the mysterious impulses that Freud tried to explain, sites that explain conquest, competition, sex, social standing, and the celebrities who embody these and other impulses.

BZZT

Charlie surfs. Nowadays, everybody does.

My ASD - Attention Surplus Disorder

I've realized that I have an attention problem. Most literature focuses on ADD - attention deficit disorder. Yet the problems stemming from ADD seem hard to recognize. Flitting from topic to topic, inability to stay focused ... all seems perfectly fitting for a culture made up by surfing the web, channel surfing, and the modern style of ping pong conversations that bounce from topic to esoteric reference to topic. ADD is less likely to make one a pariah than to make one fit in.

By contrast, I have ASD - attention surplus disorder. I find myself absorbed for hours by good books. The 15-page articles in the Atlantic or Foreign Affairs strike me as scarcely long enough to do justice to the topic. When I find myself wanting to relax in a hotel, I invariably find myself tuned to PBS or HBO because the incessant commercial interruptions elsewhere drive me to distraction and even if the movie or documentary is bad, I'm likely to watch it simply because it has a large enough canvas to actually paint something that isn't the time equivalent of a miniature.

This can work to my disadvantage. I've long ago learned to resort to quips and quick observations in conversations. Any arguments that take more than 4 minutes to unfold, or involve more than 2 points, are likely to leave people with a glazed look, so I typically avoid those. Those suffering from ADD can be the life of the party; those of us with ASD suck the life out of parties.

Had my case of ASD been coupled with sufficient intelligence, I could have become one of the disillusioned intellectuals who write long and ignored books. Fortunately for the world, my case of ASD has been paired with sufficiently less intelligence and its damage is limited to a smaller radius of friends and family, usually manifest through conversations or blog postings that go on for too long.

Like anyone suffering from the human condition, those of us suffering from ASD need your compassion. Pretend to listen to us. Nod and say, "That's really a good point," when we stop to catch our breath. When that fails, send us to the corner with a fascinating book. It'll be hours before we look up. Until then, you're safe.

2017 AD - Preoccupations with Lice & Television

NBC has a program about life in 2017. Based on the article they have on their website, they are taking the usual route with such predictions: focusing on machine or information technology and extrapolating past trends.

To me, the more interesting predictions focus on social technology and disruptions rather than the continuation of trends.

The greatest invention in the West is one still needed in many parts of the Middle East: religious tolerance in lieu of religious standards. The acceptance of debt as normal changed the 20th century economy at least as much as the automobile.

I would argue that so many futurists focus on machine technology because social technology and practices seem invisible. We use credit cards or take out loans to buy a home? Didn't we always? We allow religious freedom? Well of course, isn't that what we've always done? Shop for entertainment or watch TV for news? Well of course.

Csikszentmihalyi, in his book Finding Flow, writes that "in thirteenth century French villages - which were among the most advanced in the world at the time - the most common leisure pursuit was still that of picking lice out of each other's hair. Now, of course, we have television."

A more interesting question about the future than what technology we use is where will lie the locus of control for our attention. Will media continue to control our attention? Grooming products? Will performance enhancement drugs make us even more obsessed with sex as a culture or less?

Those who control your attention control the direction of the world. Teachers and religious leaders and scientists and media producers control our picture of reality today and, consequently, our goals.

The locus of attention and who controls it is always the most defining aspect of any culture. Predictions about that seem to me much more interesting than predictions about machine or information technology. But then, NBC has plans to capture your attention and probably wouldn't want to mention that. Instead, they try to keep your attention with predictions about computing power. One can hardly blame them for trying. Or from directing your attention away from the fact that they are trying to capture yours.