Thursday, September 11, 2014
Who's in Control? Me or the Meme?
Ideas as organisms is a concept foreign to me. Gleick refers to the Parisian biologist Jacques Monod's analogy that "Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role" (p. 311). Ideas are vast and very difficult to measure, they change quickly and are most certainly evolving. Gleick goes on to explain that people are simply "meme vehicles," that we simply fuel the memes regardless of their truth and regardless of whether or not they are beneficial to our own survival. Basically it is proposed that the meme controls us. I believe there is some truth to this, people are often swept up in the latest fad, the latest trending topic. It is easy to convince someone that as long as they follow some predetermined set of rules there will be a great reward for them in "the end." However it is not true that people do not analyze the truth or benefits of a meme and then rebel against it. To me, human will is still the controller.
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Something I like about this is that it directly differs with my own idea of memes having control over humans. While I understand what you are saying about the human mind still retaining control over what they get caught up in, even if someone were not to follow a fad in earnest isn't all of life essentially a fad? We live as we have been taught to, but I can also see where what you say has some backing to it where we can pick and choose what we follow and what we do not.
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