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Good article! I'm going to hijack this comment section to raise a question: is memetic desire weakening with the mass personal communication of the internet?
by david927 8y ago
Good article! I'm going to hijack this comment section to raise a question: is memetic desire weakening with the mass personal communication of the internet?
I think that up until the 1990's you would identify more with an entire group. Are you a rebel? Then style your hair like this and wear these clothes; so much so that when someone sees you, they know exactly that you're a rebel.
But in the last twenty years, it seems that the internet has allowed us to pick and choose our memetic desires in a more fine-grained way. Instead of belonging to one group we are an amalgam of many groups, and you can no longer as easily look at someone and say, "That person is of the group 'x'."
And if so, doesn't this give us hope that while we are (if you agree with Girard's premise) not our own desires, we are more and more a unique collection of desires and that itself is more and more unique?
- streulpita 8y agoOn the internet, we spend even more time looking at other people, so I’d say mimetic desire is even more intense.
- freeflight 8y agoTho it hasn't always been like that. Mid-90's Internet feels like utopia compared to our modern social reality dominated Internet. When you met somebody online back then, you were just happy to have found somebody else. They didn't have profiles and pictures allowing you to put people into boxes before even talking with them. People actually had to talk to each other to find out more about whom they were talking to, it required actual back and forth interaction and not just browsing a half-invented profile page to use that as "ammunition" to put somebody else down for their listed views/positions.
- ams6110 8y agoThere were rudimentary profiles. If you "fingered⁕" someone, you could see the contents of their ~/.plan and ~/.project files, which formed something like a profile. ⁕ FINGER(1) NAME finger – user information lookup program
- lscharen 8y agoBack in the day John Carmack's .plan file was my social media feed. https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/ https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/
- david927 8y agoIn some sense, for some people, I think that's true. FB and IG certainly foster certain types of mimetic desires. But I think for the rest, it's less homogeneous in what we're seeing. When people used to watch TV, there was much more of a consensus on how we defined ourselves. That's going away.
- mothsonasloth 8y agoTechnology is an amplifier of human nature (for better / or worse)
- davemp 8y ago> Technology can be an amplifier of human nature (for better / or worse) or > Modern technology is an amplifier of human nature (for better / or worse) FTFY: There's no inherent reason in "technology" that it has to amplify deficiencies in human nature. Our current tech likely does amplify human nature, but future or theoretical alternatives don't have to do the same.
- glaurung_ 8y agoRelevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1095/ https://xkcd.com/1095/