Posts Tagged ‘culture’

memes: mimicry vs replication

[updated 2009-03-03]
The core thrust of making memetics a respectable science with falsifiable claims and other tell-tale signs of ‘rigour’ has been the idea of replication.
As I wrote in a much older post about memes, there have already been some interesting replicators posited as possible memes. Unfortunately, this path hasn’t yielded the big breakthroughs that would [...]

Frak this! Galactica’s linguistic legacy.

So apparently, the word ‘Frak’ is fast becoming everyone’s favourite swearword. The ingenuity of the word Frak lies in its phonetic similarity to its grosser cousin. It wouldn’t work half as well as the other word if it didn’t sound so completely like it. And yet it isn’t that other word… a fact that has [...]

Savannah thinking vs post-scarcity thinking

(updated 2009-10-11)
I have a silly pet name for that part of our survival instinct that has been annealed through eons of ‘belong-or-perish’ regimes. I call it ‘Savannah Thinking’.
Figuring out what the group consensus is, and and then acting accordingly has worked since we, as is now generally accepted, got down from the trees and struck [...]

The culture of fragmented media : part 2

while in the culture of personal sound, there seems to be some shared habits in how people consume audio content, people have very different viewing habits. Is it because we’re always being shown imagery of people listening to music on their phones/ipods but we have no shared iconography for people watching tv or consuming [...]

The culture of fragmented media : part 1

[updated 2010-06-03]
Tivo, blogs, podcasts, vodcast, iptv, online dvd rentals… the list goes on. Our very fragmented media has some interesting effects on society. For one thing, you can say goodbye to the phenomenon of shared culture. It’s getting harder and harder to encounter people who read, watch, listen to or even do the same things [...]