Users of
Internet Explorer 6.x
or before should be aware
that this site works best in
Firefox (best choice) or
Internet Explorer 7.x.
Some helpful links:
 |
| IE 7 at Microsoft |
Disclaimers
The views expressed by contributors to Dreaming 5GW are entirely their own and may not reflect the views of other contributors or the general editor.
Site
Moral resilience operates on multiple levels. First, at the level of an organization as a result or product of what Colonel Boyd described as:
“A grand ideal, overarching theme, or noble philosophy that represents a coherent paradigm within which individuals as well as societies can shape and adapt to unfolding circumstances—yet offers a way to expose flaws of competing or adversary systems. Such a unifying vision should be so compelling that it acts as a catalyst or beacon around which to evolve those qualities that permit a collective entity or organic whole to improve its stature in the scheme of things.”
Secondly, as the membership internalize the values of the “unifying vision” and acquire moral resilience which in turn produces psychological resilience in the form of the individual’s behavioral response to stress or threat.
Thirdly, moral resilience is itself an attractive meme, a “beacon” that draws support in the form of new members ( a “catalyst”) or the admiration of uncommitted observers. Or perhaps, repeated demonstrations of moral resilience may have a daunting effect or undermine the morale of adversaries and competitors.
[“On Moral and Psychological Resilience,” ZenPundit, 20 May 2006.]
*
I have said many times: the hardest thing to track is a meme. But I have never given an explanation for why this is so. Here it is: memes do not travel. They are not transmitted. They emerge. Within individuals. This is OODA. Network theorists might postulate a series of concrete effects, or causes, leading to such emergence, and collectively call each set of effects ‘meme’ for explaining how quite similar memes emerge in diverse locations; and they’re welcome to do so, because that itself is a useful meme.
[” ‘Global Guerrillas’ as 5GW Warriors,” CGW, 19 October 2006.]
*
What causes new linking though between blogs with no prior connection ? I would suggest that memes play a central role in “attracting” and later sustaining such connections. Sociability is certainly an important variable but I don’t think that is critical in making initial decisions to make contact in the first place. The blogosphere is a very detached place; after all, if we really wanted to be “social”, we’d get off the computer and go speak to a live human being ! Many of us are online (or are online addicts) because we are craving intellectual stimulation that may be lacking in our professional or personal relationships.
[“Bar-Yam’s Shifting Hub: But Are Memes a Critical Factor in New Links in the Blogosphere?” ZenPundit, 01 January 2007.]
*
Network theorists may believe definitive ‘networks’ exist connecting these individuals, but in so doing they often make the mistake of believing that what they have discerned to be stable routes and routings — i.e., networks — can be understood to exist regardless of the individuals using those paths. I.e., to define a network is to believe that such interaction between individuals is prefigured by the available routes of data transmission….
These network theorists may finally be realizing that so-called networks do not lead to the emergence of activity so much as that activity leads to the emergence of networks — and that these actual connections are transitory, ephemeral, constantly changing. Any established ‘network’ may in fact be merely a fossilized account of activity rather than an ongoing account of real activity. We must not equate the architecture with the activity, because they are separate things. Most importantly, in a world of static, and particularly in a future world in which larger numbers of sources exist (many of them more empowered through the effects of globalization and the fluidity of the architecture they are using) — i.e., in a world with increasing levels of static — the imposition of a definitive network architecture onto the world for the express purpose of channeling activities will become increasingly difficult.
”Interlude: Static Visualized, Conceptualized,” CGW, 2 January 2007.
*
But these eccentrics were eccentrics.
ec·cen·tric adj. 2. Not having a common center; not concentric; “eccentric circles”.I.e., they’re likely to follow their own paths. A sphere is not a circle, after all; and Emerson’s ‘ephemerals’ in the poem he used to open his essay on “Circles” are all individuals. They are individual in that they follow their own paths, uniquely; but nonetheless, these multifarious path-treaders on the surface of the sphere rarely seem to grasp the fact that they are attached to surface conditions, and that all their unique movements have a common center. They do not see the sphere; if they did, “A new genesis were here.”
[“Emersonian Circles,” CGW, 8 March 2007.]
*
Increasingly rapid advancement of technology and increasing levels and varieties of interaction in a globalizing world will make vertical establishment of a particular order relatively impossible — relative to the efficacy of similar methods used in the past — and thus chaos which would be resolved into a beneficial and desirable order will necessarily be resolved at the root level, i.e., at the level of the individual. Guide the most individuals, and you will have the most influence in shaping the system — if, that is, you guide them well….
If future empires are to manifest, they will manifest when a sufficiently large number of people join an ‘empire of mind.’ A manner of thinking produces a corresponding manner of doing.
[“Empires of the Mind,” CGW, 21 March 2007.]
*
According to the Jamestown Foundation, a Syrian member of Al-Qaeda, Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, has formulated a new operational strategy growing in popularity among global jihadists. The plan’s primary feature is radical decentralization. In al-Suri’s opinion, the biggest mistake that the jihadi movement made was to grow dependent on fixed camps, like the ones Bin Laden maintained in Sudan and Afghanistan. Although useful in training recruits, fixed locations trapped Al-Qaeda units where Western forces could eventually invade and destroy them. Similarly, al-Suri also sees the traditional hierarchal model of a terrorist or insurgent group as a weakness. If authorities capture one member, the organization as a whole is put at risk.
Instead, al-Suri proposes a “jihad of individual terrorism,” with self-contained autonomous cells employing an easily available (most likely on the internet) terror “template” to start their own jihad. The glue holding these autonomous jihadis together would simply be a common cause, with leadership offering little more than ideological guidance. There would be no organizational links between cells.
[“Future War: The War on Terror After Iraq,” Adam Elkus, Jihad Monitor, 26 March 2007 (pdf) .]
(I once commented at the Bar-Yam link to ZenPundit, above, “I can’t help thinking that what are called ‘memes’ are hubs, of a sort … but not in the typical, stable-network sense of the term….Heh, I’ll probably have to explicate in a future post.”)
More to come……
Posted by Curtis Gale Weeks on Apr 3, 2007 10:21 PM
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Memes as Nodes in Complex Interactivity.
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://dreaming5gw.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.cgi/95.
7 Comments
Re: memes (and cross-commented over at PC)
This is very close to the intention behind the original, pre-media-exposure definition of meme. A meme is a transmittable behavior. But behavior requires a genetic foundation to emerge.
In a class experiment, for instance, it is possible to spread the meme of fear of snakes among chimps easily. One sees another scream upon seeing a snake, and subsequently will be afraid of snakes. However, it is very difficult to teach chimps fear of flowers. One chimp sees another scream upon learning a flower… and all the chimp learns is that some other chimps are unhinged.
In the first case, the meme was able to “emerge,” or be “evoked.” In the second case, it was not.
.. and from my blog:
Dan,
I’m sure that much controversy over what constitutes a “meme” will make a difference in how we see their process of formation or so-called propagation. In fact, I tend to think that Dawkins’ analogy with genes is misleading, when genes and memes are compared too closely with the assumption that memes must replicate in a way similar to genetic replication: Not that similarities in process do not exist, but that thinking of memes as some form of a-biological genes with the intent of describing memetic engineering or “meme evolution” in terms of genetic replication or genetic evolution not only simplifies the memetic process too much, it’s probably very wrong.
At the same time, biological factors (including genetics), greatly affect the emergence of memes. Similarities in environmental conditions — and, I’m lumping genetics into that material complex — will lead to similar emergences, or similar memes. Imitation is an idea that has been used to explain how memes “travel” or propagate; however, I suspect that, on the contrary, the common material factors — the “common ground” and common biologies — lead to similar emergences of memes, and this reality has led to the magic-cloudy concept of imitation. The similar emergences do point at similar ground (similar environmental, material factors); but an awareness of such similarity has promoted an abridgement of what occurs: or, a “bridgement”, i.e., imitation. The attempt to use the magic-cloudy concept of imitation to describe what happens is an attempt to define a linear progression that mimics the way that the very material genes propagate through direct interaction with one another within an environment.
Incidentally, that concept of gene replication may be responsible for the “genetic vs environmental” influences split which leads to many controversies over how humans form behaviors.
Instead, I see memes as being something like what Arherring once called a “consilient effect.” While matter and energy and the forces of the material world lead to the emergence of memes, meme-formation is not so much a case of independent and insular entities being transmitted or coming into contact with one another and propagating or mutating, etc.; rather, it’s much more complex than that. Similar memes may emerge in diverse locations as a result of similar confluences in individuals who have had no direct contact and only tenuous indirect contact. However, so-called linguistic “transmission”, and even “imitation”, may be thought of as an attempt to narrow or limit the environmental factors that come to bear on a point, with the express intent of forcing a particular emergence; indeed, to the degree that many common environmental/biological factors already exist between persons, the added difference of a focused attempt — a commonly experienced change within that environment — may produce similar memes between them.
What’s the write way to draw a meme-based network?
Are human beings the nodes, and memes the edges - with a human being have a human-node have an edge for each meme-being modeled? So person A and B are connected by Meme Z with an edge magnitude that is a function of geography, and intensity of belief?
Or should it be the other way around.. Is the node a meme. Similar memes are connected by edges that represent closeness/compatibility as a function of the number of imans, geography, intensity of belief, etc?
PurpleSlog,
Good questions. I’ve been trying to visualize my “fingertip feelings” about how the ‘network’ might be drawn, and am still working on it. In general, I think we need to go beyond the 3-dimensional geography when trying to model what happens. For instance, two people who have never met, do not know of the existence of each other, and are only very tenuously in relationship — say, on opposite sides of the world, but related by being on Earth — would be ‘connected’ if they each had a meme in common. ( I put the word connected in single quotes, because the very idea of connection has strong 3-dimensional overtones.) These two hypothetic persons may have many other memes in common between them and with others; they may have memes between them that are very similar if not identical; they may have many memes not in common or similarity, as well.
But I would not stray too far from the human, or consider meme ‘networks’ without considering humans active within the 3-dimensional environment. RE: social OODA interaction, my reason for exploring the emergence of memes is tied to my interest in how human activities are inspired and directed by the memes that emerge within individuals and how these activities alter the world leading to the emergence of other memes.
So the consideration given in the paper by Adam Elkus, linked above, interests me, because we might consider al-Suri’s hypothetical “jihad of individual terrorism” to be an example of diverse individuals ‘connected’ by a common cause and common terrorism template, even if they never meet nor know of each others’ existence. To the degree that they act in common ways, they may produce the emergence of other memes, some of which are very common, in diverse locations; and, the process continues, is iterative. You might visualize this as a common node affecting diverse geographical realities in common ways; i.e., diverse concrete realities (including people) are directed by that common node, even if that single node would seem like many nodes in a standard (perhaps increasingly archaic) network, or from a 3-dimensional geographical p.o.v.
My main analogy with the paper was that of hackers——I think that these terrorists, though acting individually, can act as an self-improving network that consistently raises lethality, like hackers communicating in a chat room about how to make the most lethal virus.
I find the meme connection intriguing though. I am a very huge fan of Richard Dawkins and The Selfish Gene.
AE,
They might act individually, but they are still a single unit seeking to improve itself — even if they do not realize they are part of this unit.
I’ll admit that the sort of formulation I have been attempting here has some obstacles; my own mind is still reaching for the reality! One major obstacle lies in the way we habitually see persons as independently operating forces that must make contact, or connect, in order to share information. While I’m all for a consideration of free individuals and will admit the foolishness of considering human groups as distinct bodies or entities regardless of the composition of those groups, nonetheless I think that the open-source environment and the fluidity of the architecture which now enables rapidly changing routes of ‘transmission’ will produce very real conglomerations which happen to be connected at common sources, or memetic nodes. For instance, the typical anti-network activities which seek to destroy said networks by destroying a traditional node — a person, a website, etc. — may fail utterly because there will simply be too many identical nodes already present or soon to emerge as a result of activity by individuals harboring those memes: this means that the meme-network may self-perpetuate as well as prove resilient (evolutionarily speaking!) As I once wrote, in a very convoluted and perhaps therefore tiring post (an earlier exploration, that is), in order to actually destroy such meme-networks in the traditional manner, the entire Web, and all manner of economic and social connections, would need to be utterly destroyed —
— not a very pretty prospect.
Curtis,
I actually wholly agree with that formulation, especially your conclusion.