Congregationality is the phenomenon by which like-minded people gather together in one place (or “congregate”) for the purposes of mutual support and the furtherance of some common cause. (This concept should not be saddled with the religious connotations of the word “congregation,” though religious congregations are an excellent example of the phenomenon.) Ethan Zuckerman (in a TED Talk) uses the term “flocking” for this phenomenon, clearly drawing upon the old adage "Birds of a feather flock together."
Crossroadsivity is the quality (or the measure of the quality) of being a point where various flows of (social, cultural, or other) traffic cross each other. Crossroads serve to connect remote locations to each other. The greater the connectivity at such points, the greater their crossroadsivity. Hubs and nexus points may be said to possess a high degree of crossroadsivity.
Congregationality and crossroadsivity play a vital role in cultural evolution.
Commonly held memes draw people together (much as “strange attractors” form clustering structures in Chaos Theory), but this is for social rather than memetic reasons. Congregations form out of the personal need for mutual support, whether it is “moral support” or “creative support.” Artists hobnob with other artists, and “schools” and “movements” of art emerge spontaneously as a result. Certain areas become know as places for certain types of people (with a certain meme matrix) to congregate. Paris became a congregation point for Cubists (among other avant-garde artists) in the early 20th century, and for existentialists a generation later. Today, in a similar manner, fashion designers congregate in Paris, Milan, or London, and the glitterati congregate in the Swiss Alps. American homosexuals at one time congregated in California (in the Los Angeles/San Francisco area) or, on the East Coast, in Greenwich Village (which was also a congregation point for artists and other “bohemians”). These congregation points achieve their status as congregation points because they are conducive to the preservation and propagation of the memes held by the congregants. Note that gay culture flourished in California and New York precisely because of the congregation of gays and lesbians in these areas, and also precisely because these areas provided the gays and lesbians who flocked there with the wherewithal to flourish. Tehran, by contrast, could not conceivably be a congregation point for the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) community—or for free thinkers or secular humanists for that matter. The memetic climate there is simply not conducive to the preservation of such meme complexes.
Quite different from, but related to, the congregation point is the crossroads. The crossroads is not an attractor in the way that a congregation point is. Its virtue lies in its having a strategic location. In other words, it just happens to be a place that travellers have to pass through on their way to some other destination. People are forced to come to crossroads by circumstances unrelated to their memetic makeup or their desire for the company of others with similar meme complexes. The greater the amount of traffic that passes through a crossroads, the richer a place it will be for cultural evolution, for it brings together people with different meme matrices and provides an opportunity for meme mixing, meme borrowing, and meme propagation. Travellers pick up memes at the crossroads from strangers that they encounter, often by accident, and then carry these newly acquired memes off to remote destinations, thus aiding in their propagation. The Fertile Crescent was just such a crossroads in the ancient world, being located, as it was, at the intersection of several trade and migration routes, and it provided the impetus for a great deal of cultural evolution. In fact, it would be fair to say that the crossroadsivity of the Fertile Crescent almost single-handedly determined the shape of the world as we know it today. Over the centuries, however, the crossroadsivity of the Fertile Crescent declined as Rome assumed dominance through its military might and took over as the primary crossroads of the ancient world, as pithily encapsulated in the saying "All roads lead to Rome." Today, the former Fertile Crescent, now renamed memetically “The Middle East,” serves as a crossroads of a different kind, as various groups fight for possession of it or for dominance in the region. It should be noted that crossroads do not necessarily have to be located where trade and migratory routes intersect. Centres of pilgrimage also qualify as crossroads in terms of memetics. They are a sort of cross between a crossroads and a congregation point, for they do attract people to them, but only temporarily, and in this sense they are crossroads-like. Their fluxing populations make them the perfect mixing ground for all sorts of memes. Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales provides good evidence that pilgrimage sites—and the act of pilgrimage itself—served as an effective means of meme mixing and meme transfer. In Chaucer’s work, various travelling pilgrims exchange stories and respond to each others’ stories, and they presumably carried these stories back with them to wherever they came from, once the pilgrimage was accomplished.
It is not often that a given location serves both as a crossroads and also as a congregation point. Crossroads are not typically conducive to the preservation of the memes of special interest groups, simply because of the transitory nature of their fluxing populations. Thus, crossroads do not make good congregation points, which tend to be more settled and have more stable populations. Congregation points need to offer a degree of seclusion and protection against the onslaughts of opposing or countervailing forces, something that crossroads cannot provide. However, the digital revolution of the late 20th century collapsed that traditional divide between congregation points and crossroads. Today, the Internet has evolved into a single entity that serves both functions remarkably well, integrating, as it does, the crossroads and the congregation point into one overarching, all-encompassing system.
First, it allows for the co-existence in one place (in virtual space) of multiple congregation points. Websites that cater to every conceivable special interest can be found on the Internet, from Goth culture to esoteric brands of geekery. Homosexuals do not need to congregate in Greenwich Village or along Castro Street any more, though many still do. Their new congregation place is the social networking websites that cater specifically to the interests of the LGBT community, something they can access without ever leaving home. Terms such as “surfing” and “browsing” when applied to the Internet capture quite aptly the congretationality of the Internet. Surfers tend to congregate in areas where the size and speed of the waves make for the most exciting and challenging surfing, and cattle browse where pastures are greenest. Surfing and browsing are congregational activities, whether they are understood literally or metaphorically.
The Internet also functions as a universal crossroads where people from all over the world pass in and out on their way to some other destination. Social networking sites such as Facebook and professional networking sites such as Linkedin are particularly desisgned to fulfill this “crossroads” function. A site such as Facebook makes it “a breeze” to flit in and out of the lives of other people at will, taking in or leaving out as much or as little as one is inclined. The Search Engine (as epitomized by Google) is a prime contributor to the crossroadsivity of the Internet. Search engines makes it possible to pass through, pick things up, and move on, all very much on the fly. It is the new mode of travel along the Information Superhighway. It is the perfect medium for the spread of memes, and it spreads them more rapidly and efficiently than physical crossroads ever did.
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