Footnotes

The agent changes by learning something new, the information changes by the knowledge the agent already had. Therefore, a meme reaching an agent, will be transmitted in a changed form. Thus, cultural evolution is Lamarckian: characteristics acquired during the lifetime of the meme’s carrier can be transmitted to later carriers selectively, depending on their fitness. [...]

See the Trend Growth figure in Chapter 1. The long tail, as an ecological space for memes, is broken up into four categories: Late Majority, Early Majority, Early Adopters, and Innovators.
Return to Page

Much more about using triggers can be found in Kevin Hogan’s book Covert Persuasion and Joseph Sugarman’s book Triggers. Dave Lakhani released his book on Persuasion after we’d completed the manuscript for The Art of Memetics, or we would have included it in our print edition’s bibliography. We include it here to rectify [...]

Please bear in mind that we are not discounting his work, far from it. Thought Contagion, along with Richard Brodie’s Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme, are profoundly accessible works on the way that belief grows and manifests in culture. (Add MindControlMarketing and you’ve got the three books necessary to [...]

Feedback loops can be thought of as self-perpetuating situations, or active tautological events. The study of language evolution provides a way of thinking about the effect of feedback loops over time.
Note: We were both unaware of the book I Am A Strange Loop (2007) by Douglas Hofstadler at the time [...]

Lynch, Aaron. (1996) Thought Contagion. In this book, his analysis of Mormonism through the lens of memetics places emphasis on generational transmission, and highlights these factors as evolutionary pressures.
 
Return to Page

Or that the communication methods themselves are predisposed toward carrying a specific type of “social change” meme – twitter, for example, was predisposed to carry a ‘twitter revolution’ meme, regardless of any real world situation.
Return to Page

Return to Page

This is, indeed, a shout-out: Rigorous Intuition is an interesting example of apophenionic symbology and hyperstition at play.  Commentary on a culture and it’s institutions has become a kind of myth-making in its own right, and this particular blog deconstructs contemporary events in a very unique way.
Return to Page

The interesting thing is that if computer viruses had been more widespread in the seventies when Richard Dawkins wrote this book, he might have used viruses and worms as a depiction of non-biological evolution rather than coining the term “meme.” See his speech here.
Return to Page