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.
Showing posts with label cultural evolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cultural evolution. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Paradigm Shifts in Cultural Evolution
(Continued from the previous post, "Memes, Replication, and Application")
While the small incremental changes that occur through copying errors in the imitation process do lead to cultural “microevolution” (the development of a new style of pottery, for example, or a new shape for an arrowhead) major advances, which we might refer to as “paradigm shifts,” are not achieved through the accumulation of small errors. When a paradigm shift occurs, there is a sideways movement in the flow of evolution, rather than a branching off, as in biological evolution. This is where the analogy between biological evolution and cultural evolution breaks down. The classic model of biological evolution is the tree structure, often referred to as the Tree of Life, now sometimes modified to the Web of Life (in an attempt to make the model more “three-dimensional”). However, the tree metaphor does not quite suit what goes on in cultural evolution. There is no metaphor that can be drawn upon for a model of cultural evolution. The closest one can come to creating a visual model of the process is to invoke the image of a series of train tracks, with cultural trains running along them. Every now and then, a train jumps from one track to another (something that has to be imagined, since it does not occur in reality). Perhaps one might think of quantum particles making their quantum leaps from one energy level to another. Jumping the tracks works better than quantum leaping as a model for cultural evolution, however, since the train that has jumped to another track proceeds along that track and goes off in a completely different direction from the one it was originally travelling in. This is the essence of paradigm shifts in cultural evolution.
Perhaps the most dramatic paradigm shift in cultural history is the introduction of agriculture (here used broadly to include animal husbandry). It brought about a fundamental change in the way humans lived, and it took human evolution (both cultural and biological) in an entirely new direction. What is important to note is that there is no smooth transition or continuum between hunting-gathering and agriculture. There were no small incremental steps by which one “evolved” into the other. There was an enormous leap of the imagination, a leap in which a lateral move was made to an entirely new way of thinking about the acquisition of sustenance for the preservation of life. In making this leap, humans gave birth to the notion of “food” and to the conceptual distinction between sustenance and food. The instrument that made the leap possible was, not unsurprisingly, a meme—what we might call the “production” meme. This meme had been around for a while and had contributed greatly to the business of sustenance acquisition, for humans had been devising and producing tools for the purposes of hunting and gathering for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years before the introduction of agriculture. What was new was the idea that sustenance could be produced just as tools could be produced—a classic example of the transapplication of a meme. When the “production” meme was “transapplied” to the acquisition of sustenance, a new meme was created—the “food” meme. Food, then, is defined, in its simplest terms, as sustenance produced. No other species produces its own sustenance, and this is one of the first things that set the human species apart from its other animal relatives. We might speak of fish as “food” for polar bears or seeds and worms as “food” for birds, but this is surely a metaphorical usage—a metaphor applied backwards (in the context of meme generation) in that it is not the kind of metaphor that leads to cultural evolution as described above. Only humans can be said truly to have “food”—understood here as sustenance produced intentionally and in a planned and organized fashion.
The introduction of food production by means of agriculture was perhaps the first paradigm shift in cultural history, and it put the human species on a very different track—the fast track, so to speak, for cultural evolution then took off at lightning speed and began to advance exponentially. Prior to this great turning point in cultural history, cultural evolution proceeded at a glacial pace, precisely because transapplication had not yet been discovered and any changes that occurred did so only along the track of imitation and minor variation. Once the “transapplication” meme established itself in human consciousness, cultural evolution began to take off in leaps and bounds. People everywhere began transapplying memes and producing new ones as a result. The difference between imitation and transapplication is that imitation may give rise to new products (which may be thought of as “memes” of a lower sort), such as a more efficient spear or a sleeker arrowhead, but transapplication gives rise to fundamentally new memes (which are the “higher” memes). The “food” meme did not exist until the “production” meme was transapplied to the activity of acquiring sustenance. The products that resulted from the introduction of the “food” meme were of a fundamentally different sort from earlier products in the same category. Food products grown or raised in a field for the express purpose of sustaining human life belong to a different order from fruit growing on a tree in the wild or an animal hunted down and eaten on the fly. The latter belong to the “feast-or-famine” mode of life, whereas the latter do not. Interestingly enough, human biology did not keep up with human cultural evolution. The current spate of obesity around the world but particularly in North America owes at least something to the fact that human biology has not yet adjusted to the constant and plentiful supply of food that is available to humans today as a consequence of the introduction of the “food” meme not so very long ago in human history.
The lesson to be learned is that paradigm shifts may have a downside and that cultural evolution is not always an “upwards and onwards” endeavour. But the broader lesson is that paradigm shifts in cultural evolution owe their occurrence specifically to the presence of the "transapplication" meme and the activity of transapplying memes from one area of life to another.
While the small incremental changes that occur through copying errors in the imitation process do lead to cultural “microevolution” (the development of a new style of pottery, for example, or a new shape for an arrowhead) major advances, which we might refer to as “paradigm shifts,” are not achieved through the accumulation of small errors. When a paradigm shift occurs, there is a sideways movement in the flow of evolution, rather than a branching off, as in biological evolution. This is where the analogy between biological evolution and cultural evolution breaks down. The classic model of biological evolution is the tree structure, often referred to as the Tree of Life, now sometimes modified to the Web of Life (in an attempt to make the model more “three-dimensional”). However, the tree metaphor does not quite suit what goes on in cultural evolution. There is no metaphor that can be drawn upon for a model of cultural evolution. The closest one can come to creating a visual model of the process is to invoke the image of a series of train tracks, with cultural trains running along them. Every now and then, a train jumps from one track to another (something that has to be imagined, since it does not occur in reality). Perhaps one might think of quantum particles making their quantum leaps from one energy level to another. Jumping the tracks works better than quantum leaping as a model for cultural evolution, however, since the train that has jumped to another track proceeds along that track and goes off in a completely different direction from the one it was originally travelling in. This is the essence of paradigm shifts in cultural evolution.
Perhaps the most dramatic paradigm shift in cultural history is the introduction of agriculture (here used broadly to include animal husbandry). It brought about a fundamental change in the way humans lived, and it took human evolution (both cultural and biological) in an entirely new direction. What is important to note is that there is no smooth transition or continuum between hunting-gathering and agriculture. There were no small incremental steps by which one “evolved” into the other. There was an enormous leap of the imagination, a leap in which a lateral move was made to an entirely new way of thinking about the acquisition of sustenance for the preservation of life. In making this leap, humans gave birth to the notion of “food” and to the conceptual distinction between sustenance and food. The instrument that made the leap possible was, not unsurprisingly, a meme—what we might call the “production” meme. This meme had been around for a while and had contributed greatly to the business of sustenance acquisition, for humans had been devising and producing tools for the purposes of hunting and gathering for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years before the introduction of agriculture. What was new was the idea that sustenance could be produced just as tools could be produced—a classic example of the transapplication of a meme. When the “production” meme was “transapplied” to the acquisition of sustenance, a new meme was created—the “food” meme. Food, then, is defined, in its simplest terms, as sustenance produced. No other species produces its own sustenance, and this is one of the first things that set the human species apart from its other animal relatives. We might speak of fish as “food” for polar bears or seeds and worms as “food” for birds, but this is surely a metaphorical usage—a metaphor applied backwards (in the context of meme generation) in that it is not the kind of metaphor that leads to cultural evolution as described above. Only humans can be said truly to have “food”—understood here as sustenance produced intentionally and in a planned and organized fashion.
The introduction of food production by means of agriculture was perhaps the first paradigm shift in cultural history, and it put the human species on a very different track—the fast track, so to speak, for cultural evolution then took off at lightning speed and began to advance exponentially. Prior to this great turning point in cultural history, cultural evolution proceeded at a glacial pace, precisely because transapplication had not yet been discovered and any changes that occurred did so only along the track of imitation and minor variation. Once the “transapplication” meme established itself in human consciousness, cultural evolution began to take off in leaps and bounds. People everywhere began transapplying memes and producing new ones as a result. The difference between imitation and transapplication is that imitation may give rise to new products (which may be thought of as “memes” of a lower sort), such as a more efficient spear or a sleeker arrowhead, but transapplication gives rise to fundamentally new memes (which are the “higher” memes). The “food” meme did not exist until the “production” meme was transapplied to the activity of acquiring sustenance. The products that resulted from the introduction of the “food” meme were of a fundamentally different sort from earlier products in the same category. Food products grown or raised in a field for the express purpose of sustaining human life belong to a different order from fruit growing on a tree in the wild or an animal hunted down and eaten on the fly. The latter belong to the “feast-or-famine” mode of life, whereas the latter do not. Interestingly enough, human biology did not keep up with human cultural evolution. The current spate of obesity around the world but particularly in North America owes at least something to the fact that human biology has not yet adjusted to the constant and plentiful supply of food that is available to humans today as a consequence of the introduction of the “food” meme not so very long ago in human history.
The lesson to be learned is that paradigm shifts may have a downside and that cultural evolution is not always an “upwards and onwards” endeavour. But the broader lesson is that paradigm shifts in cultural evolution owe their occurrence specifically to the presence of the "transapplication" meme and the activity of transapplying memes from one area of life to another.
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