Mediacology

If you read my post on the Hillary Soprano spot, you may be interested to read Douglas Rushkoff’s take. He believes the video fails as viral media:

Hilary and Bill Clinton have just made sure we equate Hilary’s ambitions and life with that of Tony Soprano (or, worse, Carmela - a woman who suffered her husband’s affairs in order to maintain the right to spend the capital he accumulates. Sound familiar?)

At best, the campaign understood all of this, and thought by playing it out in the open they could somehow neutralize the associations Americans already had about these two. But they did the reverse. Honestly, I didn’t think about Bill and Hilary this way until I watched the clip. And at that point, all the reservations that other people had about the couple became really clear to me.

No, this has nothing to do with policy. It’s pure symbolism. Representation. And - at least for the next few election cycles - that’s what will elect and disqualify candidates. Hilary Soprano. That’s not a media virus you want to messing around with.

But what is a media virus? Many media critics tend to believe that media are just propaganda for the system, delivered in bite-sized ideological messages that hide in advertisements. Consequently there is an epidemiological view emerging in popular culture that corporate media distribute viruses through their media, delivering information in the form of memes that comprise ideological codes. Not all are unhappy about this; marketers self-consciously boast about the latest gimmicks for branding and selling products through “viral” marketing, Malcolm Gladwell being the most recent cheerleader of this view in his books, Blink and The Tipping Point. The concept of “memes” is also circulating more frequently among media activists.

The pop cultural meme of memes was articulated in Rushkoff’s book from the late ’90s, Media Virus!, which I’m quoting at length because it contains a lot of assumptions shared about media epidemiology and memes:

Media viruses spread through the datasphere the same way biological ones spread through the body or a community. But instead of traveling along an organic circuitry system, a media virus travels through networks of the mediaspace. The “protein shell” of a media virus might be an event, invention, technology, system of thought, musical riff, visual image, scientific theory, sex scandal, clothing style or even a pop hero—as long as it can catch our attention. Any one of these media virus shells will search out the receptive nooks and crannies in popular culture and stick on anywhere it is noticed. Once attached, the virus injects its more hidden agendas into the datastream in the form of ideological code—not genes, but a conceptual equivalent we now call ‘memes.’ Like real genetic material, these memes infiltrate the way we do business, educate ourselves, interact with one another—even the way we perceive reality.” (9-10)

But are memes really what media distribute? On the most basic level memes are spread by imitation. According to Susan Blackmore, “If we define memes as transmitted by imitation then whatever is passed on by this copying process is a meme.” Contagious behaviors that are innate, she states, like yawing and laughing, are not memes. Also, memes are not “perceptions, emotional states, cognitive maps, experiences in general, or ‘anything that can be the subject of an instant experience.’” Finally, imitation is distinguished from contagions. As cognitive anthropologist Scott Atran remarks, “No replication without imitation; therefore no replication.”

I believe the basic error in the assumptions made by Rushkoff (who is echoing our society concerns with the spread of beliefs through technology) is that the DNA of a cell is not the same thing as an idea. DNA can replicate; ideas are messy. Diseases spread by replicating viruses and bacteria, and only occasionally they mutate. “Representations, on the other hand, tend to be transformed each time they are transmitted,” writes French linguist Dan Sperber. Also, Blackmore’s meme thesis (from The Meme Machine) depends on the assumption that the mind is built for memes as bodies are built for genes. The view of the mind as a computer that simply needs programming may have to do more with the bias of technology than with what is actually taking places when information spreads through culture. As Atran comments, “Unlike genes, ideas rarely copy with anything close to absolute fidelity. In the overwhelming majority of cases, an idea undergoes some sort of modification during communication. The real mystery is how any group of people manages an affective degree of common understanding given that transformation of ideas during transmission is the rule rather than exception. If transformation (mutation or drift) affects the information at a greater rate than high-fidelity replication, then a favorable or unfavorable selection bias cannot develop for the replicated (hereditary) information. In such cases, Darwinian selection becomes impossible.” Media activists assume that advertisements contain, as Rushkoff states, “ideological codes,” but as anthropologist Pascal Boyer suggests “…mental representations are never ‘downloaded’ from one mind to another. Rather, they are built on the basis of cultural input of inferential processes.” What is important is not the property of memes but the “properties of memes in interaction with the properties of inferential processes activated about them.”

The other is issue is that even if ads delivered “ideological codes,” what would they look like? Would they be statements (”freedom is slavery”), images (skinny women), sounds (rock music)? Distributed as discrete units how would the mind make sense of any of these, and how would meaning be constructed into a cultural concept? Gladwell’s discussion of Sesame Street bears some relevance here. Though he never uses the word meme, he does discuss the delivery of ideas as requiring “stickiness.” Sesame Street, and its rival show Blue Clues, explicitly designed packages of concepts and information intended to teach literacy to children. These intensely tested programs provide a little window to why some techniques work and others don’t. In the end the successful components were storylines, repetition, suspense, puzzle making, interaction and physical engagement. (89-132) This suggests that children are not passive recipients of media codes, but learn through a process of active engagement. Moreover, as anthropologist Larry Hirschfeld points out regarding race, “The race concept is acquired in cultural environments in which race is an ambient belief,” i.e. it’s catchy. This suggests that children who grow up in mediated environments will pick up on the ambient messages that pervade advertising, but how they internalize the information is more complex and environmental than the simple injection of memes.