Thursday, September 29, 2005

Need more memes!

They are taking over, true, but not fast enough. One can still step out of the memosphere for a few months, maybe almost a year and easily step back in and learn/absorb/adapt/deploy the key memes of the preceding months. What about turning on your machine every morning (better yet, getting a cortical download in a sleeping or waking state ) to find a nice list of the top 10 new memes in the last few hours. How stimulating would that be? Where is the automated meme canvasser tool?

Memes are more likely discovered than created. For a variety of reasons including unprecedented levels of self-actualization, the ongoing transcendence of humans from materialism to idea-ism, and that 95% of the scientists that have ever lived in the world are alive today, there are more memes than ever flying around the memosphere but too few and of varying quality levels.

One of the reasons for the currently slow but evolving speed of meme devolution is the quality of memes and in particular the correlation between the quality of a meme and the time it takes for it to be generated (discovered). Memes seem to come about in several ways: directly, as a synthesis, as a new idea springing from a synthesis or from long scientific or other experimental work. The long tail meme, for example, is the direct result of a synthesis of available information concerning the sales trends of music and other consumer consumables, but is not the result of ongoing scientific work which takes longer to generate. Anything hastening scientific research results will hasten the generation of high quality new memes, particularly in basic physics (e.g.; the end of particle accelerators) for example.

True, more memes probably exist than are bubbling up to the memosphere for propagation beyond their immediate audience due to structural, political and other reasons. So that needs to be resolved.

We can examine what life is like now with the meme flow we currently have. We can try to imagine what it will be like with 100x as many. What will life be like? What tools will we have and devise to capture/absorb/understand/deploy massive new amounts and types of memes? How soon will this moment arrive? Should we hasten it?

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