The core argument is that these decentralized, politically mobilized, and meme-savvy activists deployed a set of disinformation memes and framings that altered the election. Serious anthropological and computational work, in addition to the work of Marwick and Lewis, supports the argument that these meme campaigns had significant impact on the campaign.

Slides

I also have printed photos in my architecture and uniform section. And one or two memes that illustrate points very well 👀

Meme wars are culture wars, the authors write — “accelerated and intensified because of the infrastructure and incentives of the internet, which trades outrage and extremity as currency, rewards speed and scale, and flatten the experience of the world into a never-ending scroll of images and words.”

We observed an overall increase in the amount of negative information as it passed along the chain—known as the social amplification of risk.

social diffusion also makes negative information more “sticky.”

This winner-take-all popularity pattern of memes, in which most are barely noticed while a few spread widely, could not be explained by some of them being more catchy or somehow more valuable: the memes in this simulated world had no intrinsic quality. Virality resulted purely from the statistical consequences of information proliferation in a social network of agents with limited attention.

“Limited individual attention and online virality of low-quality information,” By Xiaoyan Qiu et al., in Nature Human Behaviour, Vol. 1, June 2017

Running this simulation over many time steps, Lilian Weng of OSoMe found that as agents' attention became increasingly limited, the propagation of memes came to reflect the power-law distribution of actual social media: the probability that a meme would be shared a given number of times was roughly an inverse power of that number. For example, the likelihood of a meme being shared three times was approximately nine times less than that of its being shared once.

. Just as genes propagate themselvesin the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, somemes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brainto brain via a process which, in the broad sense can be called imitation.

The vibe shift concept has more or less dissipated into meaninglessness, but it originated as an acute collective sense that something suddenly felt different in early summer 2021, following widespread vaccination and the world reopening. The preceding pandemic year had been a time of unprecedented digital immersion. With less material to draw upon from the outside world, we frantically generated content about content. Memes evolved at an accelerated rate, all the more recursive because they were all we had. At the time, this didn’t even feel strange, because it was the mere culmination of what we’d been building toward for the prior decade, and we were already acclimated. 2020 put the finishing touches on that process of rewiring our brains for social media, fully orienting us toward a world where everything is content and potential raw material for memes and discourse

The network of trails functions as a shared external memory for the ant colony.

This may be partly because political memes invariably flatten political and ethical complexity into binary narratives of good and evil. They are cast as profound moral statements signaling allegiance to the in-group, and so they are meant to attract approval (likes, reshares, and praise) not discussion or objections.

People get strangely protective of memes, and become much more defensive when challenged than if an op-ed they’ve shared is disputed. Longer form communications seem to be open to rigorous but respectful debate in ways that memes are not. It doesn’t appear to matter whether one attempts to debate the content of the meme itself, or the practice of sharing memes—criticizing a meme can feel tantamount to insulting someone’s child.

Most academics who study memes agree that they are poisonous to healthy public discourse (“toxic” is a word that crops up a lot, even in the scholarly literature). One scholar bluntly called them “one of the main vehicles for misinformation,” and they tend to distort reality in several ways. By their very nature, they leave no room for nuance or complexity, and so they are frequently misleading; they tend to lean heavily on scornful condescension and moral sanctimony (usually, the intended takeaway is that anyone who agrees with the point of view being—inaccurately—mocked is an imbecile); they make copious use of ad hominem attacks, straw man fallacies, and motte-and-bailey arguments; they intentionally catastrophize, generalize, personalize, and encourage dichotomous thinking; and they are aggressive and sometimes dehumanizing. They are, in other words, methods of Internet communication that display all the symptoms of a borderline personality type of mental disorder. Of course, it’s possible to construct a meme that is short yet still thoughtful and sophisticated, but these are few and far between.

the ice pick technique was only championed by one enthusiast physician, Walter Freeman, and was roundly decried by other psychiatrists at the time.

Have you ever … In December 2008, I came across this post from someone who was on my blogroll, or in my feeds, or something. They listed 100 things that one might have done in one’s life, and invited one to indicate those that one had actually done. I took the challenge on as a lark and then decided that the same list could prompt individual blog posts, so I started doing that.2 And now I’m resurrecting the meme, and tagging Amanda Rush and ladyhope. I hope they will participate, link to this, and tag two more people.3 Of course, if you are inspired to do it too, then just go ahead.

There is still a chance for us to escape such an unreal existence, but it will require us to stop assuaging our pain and hiding our apathy with satirical memes. It will require a determined pursuit of moral wholeness and a holistic respect for humanity and all human life, including the babies.

Meme creators and posters have been sued for using people’s images without permission, especially those who were not already public figures. In 2003, the parents of the unwilling star of the “Star Wars Kid” video sued their son’s classmates for posting the video online. Though the suit was settled, the video did not disappear, and the Star Wars Kid learned to deal with his fame.

Somewhere along the last decade, he added, YouTube prioritized chasing profits over the safety of its users. “We may have been hemorrhaging money,” he said. “But at least dogs riding skateboards never killed anyone.”

Come on, harvest me! I’ll just change your world some more.

I enjoyed Harari’s application of meme theory to the agrarian revolution of circa 10,000 BCE: it may have seemed like a giant leap for mankind, but imagine if you are wheat. As a species, you have conquered the world. Come on and harvest me! I will just spread further.

By the way, just to get back to notational bias for a sec, the term “dark pattern” is problematic for reasons that should be clear if you think about it for a minute or two so let’s collectively start working on better language for that. Mmmmkay?

We could at least try to offer better error message for this, before it becomes our next NullPointerException, Segmentation Fault or Kernel Panic

Divergent responses to annotation demonstrate what Foucault means by power running through the whole social body.

a label will inform the program “this is a cat,” and not a cheeseburger - despite some visual similarity and the former perhaps having the latter.

Although there are plenty of theories which could all be modelled, because the extant theory is so heavily based on assumptions which would have to be built into the models to make them work, they could all show interesting results which are, however, devoid of any resemblance to how culture actually happens

The resulting materialistic theory of consciousness2, where a „pandemonium‟ of various thoughts and nerve impulses struggle for expression, posits that what we comprehend as a serial stream of consciousness is actually a retrospectively experienced stream of narrative which was subject to continual editing as the various areas of the brain made their contributions.

Rather, it is the usual practice to selectively pick examples from culture to help illustrate how memes may work and therefore convenient memes tend to be invoked to help description rather than candidates for real memes discovered in their cultural settings

The scene could come right out of today’s Blue Lives Matter meme factory. Along with images of warriors, weapons, and German shepherds, pictures of children—often little blond girls—hugging cops infuse the movement with an ominous sentimentalism.

ON THE DOUBLE

Conspiracy Meme

Potential of memes

add multimedia marginalia