Footnotes

Reform the PhD system or close it down : Nature News

If doctoral education is to remain viable in the twenty-first century, universities must tear down the walls that separate fields, and establish programmes that nourish cross-disciplinary investigation and communication. They must design curricula that focus on solving practical problems, such as providing clean water to a growing population. Unfortunately, significant change is unlikely to come [...]

YouTube – IKIPR – Profession – Esoterrorist

from Silver Keys album. Listen closely to the lyrics… via YouTube – IKIPR – Profession – Esoterrorist.

The Demographic Change and Progressive Political Strategy Series

The starting premise was that progressives should, in principle, have had two strengths going for them. First, we argued that modernizing trends were shifting the demographic terrain in their political favor. Second, we asserted that the crisis had illustrated the intellectual and policy bankruptcy of conservatism, which had now proven itself devoid of creative ideas [...]

Banner Ads for The Art of Memetics

After a few requests for a way to create visual inbound links to this site, we commissioned these images for you to use as you see fit… taom-125×125.png taom-225×225.png taom-300×48.png taom-300×50.png taom-480×65.png taom2-300×48.png taom2-300×50.png taom2-480×65.png You may use any of these images to link to http://theartofmemetics.com from your site Also posted at mutato [...]

William Gibson quotes David Simon on Exposition in the Age of Google

“Fuck the exposition,” he says gleefully, as we go back into the bar. “Just *be*. The exposition can come later.” He describes a theory of television narrative. “If I can make you curious enough, there’s this thing called Google. If you’re curious about the New Orleans Indians, or ‘second-line’ musicians–you can look it up.” The [...]

Why Purim, Elin Nordegren, the Supermoon, and Forever 21 are in this Title

We got it good. With our 1950′s nuclear power plants now popping one after another on the edge of the ocean. That’s nothing, a tsunami wiped out atlantis – lybia is detonating, the middle east is tinkering with rhizomatic networking and it’s freaking the mundanes. But this was supposed to be about SEO. Let me [...]

Modern Mythology: How To Do SEO Write: And Not Be A Total Douchebag

Every morning, I scan through a twitter stream created by thousands of people, and mirror that activity on several other services. I ask myself, after a minute or two of that, “What stuck out?” If something really stuck out, you can best believe that thing is a high priority on the cultural mind right now, [...]

What Exactly is Transmedia Storytelling? And Does it Even Matter?

I don’t care what side or channel you’re in or on, what matters is that you can appeal to the best and the most curious in human behavior, and that you can use technology and media for what they can be… Platforms that can help us transcend our more traditional thinking. Furthermore, whatever we choose [...]

We are the new world order…

First, .. I find certain aspects of this idea of relentless optimism in the face of counter-public opinion about the conceit of a ‘New World Order’ to be entirely warranted. To begin, I feel most strongly that globalist pressure will lead, clearly, to a balance of power necessary to establish long-range strategic goals vital to [...]

« Tarotbot | Tarot distribution | http://liber.us : Android tarot reader

Hey artists, got your own tarot deck you want to publish? As the tarot world evolves towards digital distribution new challenges and constraints emerge, some making publishing and distribution easier for artists and some making things more difficult.The cost of distribution is much lower in digital form, but packaging a tarot deck in software prior [...]

MIT Scientist Captures 90,000 Hours of Video of His Son’s First Words, Graphs It | Fast Company

For example, Roy was able to track the length of every sentence spoken to the child in which a particular word–like “water”–was included. Right around the time the child started to say the word, what Roy calls the “word birth,” something remarkable happened.“Caregiver speech dipped to a minimum and slowly ascended back out in complexity.” [...]

Insider’s View of UltraViolet

At CES this year, a huge consortium of media and technology companies called the DECE announced that this year they plan to start releasing movies in downloadable form that will play on any “UltraViolet compatible” device regardless of where you buy it. So you can buy a movie from Amazon or BestBuy or direct from [...]

How to Hack the Dictatorship

How to Hack the Dictatorship. “Gene Sharp is an American intellectual whose ideas can be fatal to the world’s despots. For decades, Mr. Sharp’s practical writings on nonviolent revolution — most notably “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for download in 24 languages — have inspired dissidents around the world, [...]

The Egyptian revolution, and how a premature report of Mubarak’s departure spread

As a news consumer halfway around the globe, my conclusion was that these news sources were interpreting the statement that “all their demands” would be met included Mubarack stepping down. Again, it’s hard to determine who was first and the particular order, but the echo chamber, I believe, had begun here. via The Egyptian revolution, [...]

Washington Post corrects its online corrections process

A national survey by MediaBugs found only 60 percent of the daily newspaper sites it examined had any explicit way for users to report errors. via Washington Post corrects its online corrections process | Knight Digital Media Center.

Bill Moyers speaking in January to History Makers explains…

Any journalist whose reporting threatens that belief system gets sliced and diced by its apologists and polemicists say, the fabulists at Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the yahoos of talk radio. Remember when Limbaugh, for one, took journalists on for their reporting about torture at Abu Ghraib? He attempted to dismiss the cruelty inflicted on [...]

Chase Britton, Boy Without a Cerebellum, Baffles Doctors

A reminder that there’s always more to know about how the mind works: When he was 1 year old, doctors did an MRI, expecting to find he had a mild case of cerebral palsy. Instead, they discovered he was completely missing his cerebellum — the part of the brain that controls motor skills, balance and [...]

Mysterious Manuscript’s Age Determined : Discovery News

…another clue regarding one of my favorite historical mysteries: The book’s estimated 250,000 characters are totally alien. Arranged in groups like words and sentences, some resemble Latin letters and Roman numerals; others are unlike any known language.Moreover, the puzzling handwriting is surrounded by intricately drawn illustrations: plants that can’t be identified, astrological symbols, elaborate networks [...]

www.SearchEngineLand.Com : Updating Google Image Results For Online Reputation Management

Lot of excellent ideas in here for those engaged in placing information where you want people to find it, especially images and identities of entities: …we started exchanging emails with a Wikipedia administrator, explaining the background; he pointed out that the easiest way for us to remove the offending images was to license higher-quality, more [...]

Mea Culpa Marketing: Were Groupon’s Gaffes Intentional? | Fast Company

a mea culpa trend in advertising; generate buzz through tasteless, shocking blunders, then seek forgiveness and visibility for your brand once you have everyones’ attention. via Mea Culpa Marketing: Were Groupon’s Gaffes Intentional? | Fast Company.

Kenneth Burke Roadmap

This roadmap navigates through the centrifugal forces of Burkean theory by arranging concepts around the central principle of a complementary duality between formal structure and psycho-social dynamic that comes together at many different levels in Burke’s thought, but particularly in his coinage of certain key terms that for him express both formal and social aspects [...]

Psi-Fi: The Feedback Loop Between Pop Culture and Paranormal Experience

A Buddhist temple featuring Superman and a Marvel comic reproducing an actual UFO photo? A pulp fiction editor using his own precognitive dreams to write short stories and a sci-fi master getting zapped by an alien space machine? What is going on here? It would be easy to fall into an either-or mentality, as in [...]

An excellent conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

How long did it take you to translate a complex thinker like Derrida? Immediately, because I had no idea who he was. I was an Assistant Professor at Iowa…you know, I was very young: I was about 24/25 by then. I thought: here I am… a 1st class 1st from the University of Calcutta, Ph.D. [...]

Risk management, Maslow and Memetics

Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” seeks to explain human motivation, and proposes a layered series of motivators ranging from survival to self-actualization. Applying this framework to risk management reveals why individuals and organizations think first about threats, and why they see opportunities as optional extras to be addressed later if at all. Memetics suggests that ideas [...]

Does computer simulation offer the key to understanding consciousness?

Neuroscientists have yet to find anything in the brain they are happy calling consciousness, and philosophers are far from agreement over a way of talking about what happens after we wake up. Undaunted by history, one psychologist believes he has the answer. The problem, says Nicholas Humphrey, Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics, [...]

15 Styles of Distorted Thinking

Here’s the first three: 1. Filtering: You take the negative details and magnify them, while filtering out all positive aspects of a situation. A single detail may be picked out, and the whole event becomes colored by this detail. When you pull negative things out of context, isolated from all the good experiences around you, [...]

Douglas Hofstadter – Analogy as the Core of Cognition

Douglas Hofstadter examines the role and contributions of analogy in cognition, using a variety of analogies to illustrate his points. via YouTube – Analogy as the Core of Cognition.

Click Fraud Detection with Practical Memetics

“Click Fraud Detection with Practical Memetics” is an evolution of my previous Defcon presentations. The original Meme Miner program and Meme Theory were enhanced for better predictive ability which led to an accidental detection of “Pay-Per-Click” advertising fraud. This presentation includes expanded overview of Meme Theory, real-life example of Botnet click fraud, strategies to detect [...]

Catholic bloggers aim to purge dissenters | Philly | 10/24/2010

When factions within a memeplex begin organizing, pay attention – it could end up spilling out into public witch hunts.. “We’re no more engaged in a witch hunt than a doctor excising a cancer is engaged in a witch hunt,” said Michael Voris of RealCatholicTV.com and St. Michael’s Media. “We’re just shining a spotlight on [...]

Economist’s View: Where Does Hate Come From?

The easy answers are ready to hand. We might postulate a strand of political culture and thought in American society that reproduces hate and racism in some of the young people who are exposed to it. (Hate on the Internet falls in this category.) Or we might postulate a recessive “racist personality” type that is [...]

Crisis of the Mind! (Reflections on Intro)

Is there really such thing as “freedom of thought”? Or is some force bigger than myself manipulating my thinking, my consciousness? Is there such thing as “original thinking”? And if so, where do such thoughts come from anyway? Are we really that creative in our thinking, or are we picking up “mind viruses” unconsciously? Consciousness, [...]

Infictive Research – Uncle freddie’s guide for the ground level operative

Before proceeding one should assess the nature of the environment. A bookstore or library is a fine place for this. The presence of books by Philip K. Dick indicates a fictional universe. via Infictive Research – Uncle freddie’s guide for the ground level operative.

Raw research notes: (catechism is a brainwashing tool)

The difference between [opinion/thought/desire] and [belief/meme] is illustrated by these three points: * 1 – People’s opinions, thoughts, and desires are often molded by the questions they are asked. * 2 – People’s thoughts, opinions, and desires are often created in the moment and have little or no relationship with what they will actually do [...]

..and the coffee will flow like blood!Infictive Research – Why is your spider sense tingling?

This is only one entrance of many into the Infictive WIki: Officer Roy Duncan is waving a minivan through the intersection. You turn off the radio and roll up the windows. You are so wasted and the tiredness is closing in hard. You suddenly feel very sick. You open the door and vomit into the [...]

Publish your own Tarot Deck with @Tarotbot for Android

Liberus offers three models of Android tarot distribution. They vary in the technical skill required and in the amount of involvement on the part of the artist. The first model requires very little technical skill or additional effort on the part of the artist. Simply provide Liberus with images and optionally text and we will [...]

#Retrailer – Ghostbusters Recut Trailer

YouTube – Ghostbusters Recut Trailer.

Science journal publishes Quran-based theory on phenomena of life and death by Prof. Pallacken Abdul Wahid

Prof. Wahid attributes the failure to explain these phenomena in biology to the erroneous molecular gene and genome concepts. He argues that material genome is not the biological program, the cause of life. According to the Qur’an it is the invisible ghayb in Arabic non-molecular rooh also called nafs in the case of man, which [...]

Memes, Myths, Birds, Bees, and Markets, by James Curcio

Each of our lives is a story, an album, a painting, in which we play the starring role, but only posthumously, in hindsight, or through the internal wrestling of the creative process which separate us, momentarily, from our day-to-day concerns. These stories weave together into an ever-changing tapestry which we call culture. Though it sounds [...]

Why won’t #Wikileaks trend on Twitter? – Boing Boing

Twitter is “censoring” discussion of Wikileaks by preventing it becoming a trending topic, writes blogger Bubbloy. As he points out with some neat research, the popularity of Wikileaks discussion far outstrips that of the pop culture ephemera that does trend. But is there a clue in the fact Twitter’s feature isn’t called ‘popular topics?’ Perhaps [...]

a list of ongoing large-scale, multi-function natural language toolkits that are built and distributed by academics

ABNER ABNER is a statistical named entity recognizer “using linear-chain conditional random fields (CRFs) with a variety of orthographic and contextual features. Version 1.5 includes two models trained on the NLPBA and BioCreative corpora, for which performance is roughly state of the art. The new version also includes a Java API allowing users to incorporate [...]

The Revelation of the Method // Skilluminati Research

Michael A. Hoffman II is also a man who devotes a large portion of his life to questioning the historical veracity of the Nazi Holocaust. He’s a religious fundamentalist with weird hobbies, and much like myself, badly in need of an honest editor. I’m not discussing him because he’s important or correct on much of [...]

Seppukoo » About

As viral marketing strategies have been exploited by corporate media to make profit connecting people all over the world, Seppukoo playfully attempts to subvert this mechanism disconnecting people from each other and transforming the individual suicide experience into an exciting”social” experience.With Seppukoo in fact it’s not important how many friends you have, but how much [...]

Smart swarms: The power of self-organization – Peter Miller

As social media and technologies continue to disseminate and evolve, making it easier for everyone to connect with everyone else, to communicate and collaborate in ways we’ve only started to anticipate, swarm intelligence may become the norm rather than the exception. As that happens, the best leader may find themselves turning for advice to the [...]

Social networks and the connective tissue of a Big Society :: Blog :: Headshift

Although the reflex still exists to evoke fear of these positions in political campaigning, neither pro- nor anti-state positions are meaningful in themselves. We have seen the devastating social problems that resulted from the idea that there is no such thing as society, under Thatcher, and under Blair and Brown we have learned that no [...]

Cognitive Surplus – Use Social Connectivity to Change the World

Harnessing the power of the collective crowdsourcing for social change is a thread woven throughout Cognitive Surplus, and its viability requires two of Shirky’s assertions to be accurate. First, that our default state as a species is to create and share and collaborate, and we are just now moving back toward normalcy, aided by the [...]

Regarding Egregores…

…the egregore is not in total control… as the action of the social or corporate body is determined through the action of its parts, the individuals. These are intelligences that are emergent properties of the complex system that compose their bodies, and the individual people within these social or corporate bodies are not in control [...]

How to Play a Feminist by Shira Chess

While First Wave Feminism focused on suffrage, and Second Wave Feminism focused on getting women ahead in the workplace, many of the more recent fractured feminist movements have continued to ignore the importance of play and leisure in everyday lives. This all-work-and-no-play focus has ricocheted to future feminisms: none have successfully reclaimed leisure and play. [...]

Facebook: friend or foe? | Media | The Guardian

It’s the fast-growing social network and attracts far less attention than its far smaller rivals such as Twitter. And it is the users, not the site, who grab chunks of content to link to. via Facebook: friend or foe? | Media | The Guardian.

Countering Viral Marketing By Tig Tillinghast

The killing of Americans through anthrax letters isn’t itself a useful end to the terrorists. Instead, the terrorists perceive that the communication of horror — not disease — through the country, along with the polarization of overseas opinion accomplished through viral marketing, will eventually lead to the adoption of their policy goals. To counter propaganda [...]

Wanted: people who have used an online persona for self-transformation | Technoccult

Have you used an online persona to accomplish self-transformation? I’m doing research for my hypersigil project currently thinking it will take the form of a free e-book, and then be extended into something else from there, and I’m looking for personal stories from people who have attempted to use online personas to make changes in [...]

By @mistygirlph – Can You Have Real Friends on Twitter?

She gives 5 tips, here’s the first 3… 1. Don’t follow just for numbers – Twitter is your chance to really get to know real people. The numbers may be worthless if you cannot connect and inspire others. 2. They are not mere avatars – They are human beings that live and breath. Twitter is [...]

Whence Altruism? Via @mefi

A new study suggests that humanity’s sense of fair play and kindness towards strangers is determined by culture, not genetics. Speculation: the finding may be directly related to the rise of religion in human history, as well as more complex economies. via Whence Altruism? | MetaFilter.

Visual Understanding Environment

The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is an Open Source project based at Tufts University. The VUE project is focused on creating flexible tools for managing and integrating digital resources in support of teaching, learning and research. VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information. via Visual Understanding Environment.

A Whimsical Company: Kayac Inc.

Gambling for salary? The day before receiving the paycheck, each employee is required to roll a dice. A portion of their salary for the month is then multiplied by the value he/she rolls. Travelling office Every year for about 2-3 months, the company rents out an office in places such as Hawaii and Italy and [...]

via @disinfo | memetic engineering #meme

Memetics met with academic opposition from socio-biologists including Edward O. Wilson, and Dawkins himself expressed concern about memetics becoming an empirical science of culture. Dennett and others developed slightly different interpretations of memes from Dawkins, and the academic world has consequently been slow to adopt the new science. Memetic Engineering developed from diverse influences, including [...]

Director of Research at Google and AI genius | MetaFilter

Seeds of AI at Google — how the internet is shaping intelligence and learning and, in turn, the role of human culture in natural selection via Director of Research at Google and AI genius | MetaFilter.

Memes Pose As The Most Effective Tool In Brand Communication

The agent changes by learning something new, the information changes by the knowledge the agent already had. Therefore, a meme reaching an agent, will be transmitted in a changed form. Thus, cultural evolution is Lamarckian: characteristics acquired during the lifetime of the meme’s carrier can be transmitted to later carriers selectively, depending on their fitness. [...]

the reinvention of the telegram #whatistwitter

Twitter / Home

Richard Semon

His ideas of the mneme based on the Greek goddess, Mneme, the muse of memory were developed upon early in the 20th century. The mneme represented the memory of an external-to-internal experience. The resulting “mnemic trace” or “engram” would be revived when an element resembling a component of the original complex of stimuli was encountered. [...]

The rise of self-publishing

Although there is no way of breaking down the types of book being self-published, [Jane] Rowland [editor of The Self Publishing Magazine] estimates that it’s 60 per cent fiction and 40 per cent non-fiction. With the growing number of self-publishers comes a new public respect for self-published authors. So commentators who once derided “vanity published” [...]

What the Hell is Going on Here?

FuckYourBrain is an online and PDF-based fountain of knowledge and delight. The mission? To promote deliberate human evolution, to provide the material for new creations, to encourage neurogenesis, to provide data on epigenetics, to appreciate and adore beauty and power, and to advance the possibility of life extension and immortality, all with a deep sense [...]

Breast cancer awareness goes viral on Facebook . . . with bra color updates

Purple. Polka dot. Grimy white. And even as the bra colors went viral — wildly so — cyber-arguments erupted about what it all meant. Was so openly and brazenly posting something as intimate as one’s bra color an attempt to raise breast cancer awareness? Or was it all just another Facebook time-suck, another “send your [...]

Quaint Media and Today’s Memetic Ecology

I want you to imagine back in the early days of newspapers and magazines how the effect of coupons could be measured. A store owner put a coupon in a local newspaper, and then counted up the coupons that came back into the store – immediately that store owner had an understanding of the impact [...]

Infictive: About

“Infictive is not an adjective (despite what its etymology may lead you to believe) — it is a subspace. It is not limited to the county bearing its namesake, but is instead an encompassing state of ultra-real. It is nothing which you can possess, nor is it a quality which can be attributed to any [...]

Digital Narrative in an Attention Ecology

..using footage taken from multiple devices like phones, digital video cameras, closed-circuit television systems, news footage, and web cams, a storyline can be generated online which has the feel of a real sequence of events. These video elements would then be played back with overlying narrative in an actual filmic release, requiring fans of the [...]

The Telephone Repair Handbook by Mark Pesce

Today, all human communication is threaded, multi-participatory, multimodal, asynchronous, proximally indistinct, ubiquitous, continuous, and entirely pervasive. Given this enormous change in the ground conditions, it seems perfectly sensible that we should rethink the basic instrument of electronic communication. As the most concrete and pervasive manifestation of cyberspace, the mobile telephone establishes new cultural patterns of [...]

Blip Festival 2009

The Blip Festival, now one of the worlds largest and longest running events of its kind, continues to evolve with a greater breadth of international artists, a growing sophistication of styles and creative vocabulary, and a forward-thinking enthusiasm driven home by over two dozen of the worlds best musicians and visualists. If there’s one thing [...]

Weakness is Strength… when you learn from it « Edward E. Wilson

Of course merely having problems isn’t ENOUGH to qualify someone to help you. The next thing they need to have done is LEARNED from it. What have they learned about coping with, or solving the problem that you have? Even someone only slightly ahead of you on the recovery curve can help you. Next, they [...]

Jonathan Mendez’s Blog: Rising Tide of PPC Means SEO is Sinking

With all current fuss about automated content for SEO I've found the recent changes by Google here and here have only greatly diminished the value of SEO for the most valuable keywords those that have transactional value. via Jonathan Mendez’s Blog: Rising Tide of PPC Means SEO is Sinking.

Stephen Toulmin, a Philosopher and Educator, Dies at 87 – Obituary Obit – NYTimes.com

Stephen Toulmin, an influential philosopher who conducted wide-ranging inquiries into ethics, science and moral reasoning and developed a new approach to analyzing arguments known as the Toulmin model of argumentation, died on Dec. 4 in Los Angeles. He was 87. via Stephen Toulmin, a Philosopher and Educator, Dies at 87 – Obituary Obit – NYTimes.com.

Frindle

Frindle ['frindl] n., a writing device, usually a ballpoint pen.[3] It is now a real word; it means pen or writing device in English. via Frindle – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

What an ideal search engine might be like:

Scope: The ideal engine would be able to search every document on the Internet Speed: Results would be available immediately Currency: All the information would be kept completely up-to-date Recall: We could always find every document relevant to our query Precision: There would be no irrelevant documents in our result set Ranking: The most relevant [...]

Social Media Today | Research shows how much we love a blamestorm

According to Science Daily, two academics conducted four different experiements, “and found that publicly blaming others dramatically increases the likelihood that the practice will become viral.”In one example, participants read about California Governor Schwarzenegger blaming special interest groups for the failure of a special election that cost $250. The ones who did so were more [...]

Overdue library books returned half century later – Nation AP – MiamiHerald.com

Camelback High School librarian Georgette Bordine says the two Audubon Society books checked out in 1959 and the money order were sent by someone who wanted to remain anonymous. Bordine says the letter explained that the borrower's family moved to another state and the books were mistakenly packed. The letter said the money order was [...]

Cymatics

Harold Cabezas (haroldcabezas) ‘s status on Thursday, 03-Sep-09 15 … – “Sound Does Have Form…It Can Affect Matter And Cause Form Within Matter.” – Evan Grant on Cymatics-TED Video http://post.ly/3rkN. Attachments. http://haroldcabezas.posterous.com/sound-does-have-formit-can-affect-matter-and … Evan Grant: Making sound visible through cymatics (TED) « Urban … – Evan Grant: Making sound visible through cymatics (TED). This entry [...]

Cymatics Used To Create Dolphin Alphabet | Journal of Cymatics

Using high definition audio recordings of dolphins, the research team, headed by English acoustics engineer and cymatics researcher, John Stuart Reid, and Florida-based dolphin researcher, Jack Kassewitz, has been able to use cymatics to image the imprint that a dolphin sound makes in water. They have used cymatics to create “reproducible patterns that are expected [...]

Imagine Your Reality , Archive » Social media strategy for my website and web presence

Video is an underused resource in social media, but its increasingly going to become relevant as people use it to create information videos, video blogs, or comedic video entries. I’m planning on making more videos, because I know they provide a level of interactivity that people will want more of as time goes on. After [...]

Neuromarketing: What the Human Brain Means to Your Campaign

Neuromarketing companies fall into three broad categories based on technique: fMRI scanning: Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanners, weighing in at about 32 tons and costing about $3 million each, measure the level of blood flow to various regions of the brain, showing researchers where the action is. The ability to provide location-based brain mapping is [...]

Pilotlite is now Hukilau

A Hukilau is a way of fishing invented by the ancient Hawaiians. The word comes from Huki, meaning pull, and lau, meaning leaves. A large number of people, usually family and friends, would work together in casting the net from shore and then pulling it back. The net was lined with ki leaves, which would [...]

Hunvalski Vodkalots – a social experiment « Joely Righteous

Never before has it been possible to see such quick paced change across the Google SERP. At this years imedia summit Amnesia have started a social experiment in the form of @Hunvalski. The idea of this experiment is to see the amount of search results that can be generated for the term Hunvalski (a term [...]

67 Social Media Networking Sites And That’s Just To Start! / Domozych Media

How do you know which ones to use? Is there a way to target only the relevant ones? The answer is – well, sorta. This isn’t rocket science, but it is always evolving. Right now there are four ‘meta’ social networking sites that I want to introduce you to – you might think of this [...]

YouTube – The Machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube and the Politics of Authenticity

About 10 minutes of it is a minor update (rehash) of An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube, but the rest is new. The gathering may have been the highest concentration of amazingly creative and concerned global citizens I have ever been around. Hallway conversations were different than your typical conversations. Instead of lots of people saying, [...]

Musing about culture and customers and choice: the eBaying of “content” – confused of calcutta

There is an eBaying of content going on, as people repurpose stuff they find in the digital garage and attic that is the Web. Some people will become the new scavengers, looking through the detritus of the web for things to reuse and remix. Some will build the places where they look, the tools they [...]

Online Social Optimization and Lifestream Toolsets – Domozych Media / Wes’ Desk

The experience of self-publishing and distributing this book led to the formulation of an approach to marketing I labeled ‘OSO’ – or ‘Online Social Optimization’ – which encompasses three interrelated fields, online reputation management or ORM, search engine optimization or SEO, and social media optimization or SMO. The principle is simple – each of these [...]

Quaint Media and Today’s Memetic Ecology / Wes’ Desk

If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead (Part One): Media Viruses and Memes By Henry Jenkins

MIT Convergence Culture Consortium: Weblog The re-use, remixing and adaptation of the LOLcat idea instead suggest that the spread and replication of this form of cultural production is not due to the especially compelling nature of the LOLcat idea but the fact it can be used to make meaning. A similar situation can be seen [...]

Special Announcement: Project Bluebird

‘Project Bluebird: Fucking with Reality’, is a quarterly-release periodical commencing production in 2009. Project Bluebird concentrates primarily on the topics of Reality Hacking, Bio-Psionics, Neo-tantra and Modern Mysticism. Each issue of Project Bluebird features a full-color cover, with internal black and white artwork and text. Submissions of Writing and Art are now being accepted for [...]

Footnote 102

Exercise Write out a story, or at least a description, of the idealized version of your life. Write this in third person, seeking to objectively portray who you ideally would like to become. By then creating a storyline around this character, you begin building a model in your mind of how you might become that [...]

Footnote 101

Processual symbolic analysis, or comparative symbology, refers to the study of symbols used within cultural, or more specifically ritual, contexts. See Turner, V. (1974) Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society Return to Page

Footnote 100

Burroughs, William and Odier, Daniel. (1974) The Job Return to Page

Footnote 99

Carroll, P. (1992). Liber Kaos — Your mileage may vary. Return to Page

Footnote 98

Repeating affirmations you simply don’t believe causes resistance each time you repeat them. It’s much more productive to start with affirmations you occasionally find yourself believing to begin with, focusing on moving toward your goal organically, rather than through immediate, catastrophic changes. Return to Page

Footnote 97

An example of another film which uses non-linear narration to good effect is The Usual Suspects. Return to Page

Footnote 96

Jenkins, Henry (2006) Convergence Culture pp 101-103, sidebar. Henry Jenkins’ work can provide an excellent starting point in understanding trends in contemporary media culture. See the suggested reading list in the back of the book for a wealth of follow-up material. Return to Page

Footnote 95

Three Brain-Balancing Exercises: 1. Practice singing or rapping on a particular topic; trying to focus on rhyme, melody, and rhythm. Do not rely on memorized materials. Record yourself so you can go back later and look for unexpected or unintentional utterances. 2. Describe, in present tense, spontaneously arising mental images using concrete detail in all [...]

Footnote 94

A rhizomatic network is one with multiple non-hierarchical entry and exit points. Here’s a particularly compelling visual demonstration: (video) Return to Page

Footnote 93

As previously discussed, Mastermind groups are nodal points for group mind consciousness. The multimind is a breakdown of the structures and protocols of one’s personal consciousness. While we’re not declaring this as a conclusion, we do feel that using the multimind model as a way to evaluate a group mind at least provides a starting [...]

Footnote 92

Ornstein, Robert. (1986) Multimind: The multimind is the non-unified parts and separate processes that run the actual work of mental cognition. An example of this is sub-personalities; elements and triggers that form specific responses that make up an overall personality structure. Return to Page

Footnote 91

Proprioception is the awareness of internal, muscular systems at work. Being aware of the movement of muscles, the heart beating, or one’s lungs working is a proprioceptive awareness. Return to Page

Footnote 90

Hoffer, Eric. (1963) The True Believer and Frank, Thomas. (2005) What’s the Matter with Kansas? bookend nicely the problematic nature of democracy. Return to Page

Footnote 89

“Language for the Kabbalists is always mystical. It ‘reflects the fundamental spiritual nature of the world’. Speech reaches God because it comes from God. This belief is echoed, incidentally, but in a secular way, by the post-structuralist thought of people such as Jacques Derrida whose proclamation of a ‘new thinking’ holds that all knowledge and [...]

Footnote 88

Dilts, R., Grinder, J., Bandler, R., and DeLozier, J., (1980) Neuro-linguistic Programming Vol. 1 Return to Page

Footnote 87

Calhoun, Craig, Ed. (1992) Habermas and the Public Sphere pp 109-142: Nancy Frazer’s “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy” provides an excellent starting point in understanding the function of the subaltern. Return to Page

Footnote 86

Both public and counter-public spheres of discourse are social spaces, even subaltern groups have their own internal networks that influence the larger social spheres. That which cannot be referenced in public discourse will find its expression elsewhere in the social spaces of a culture. A quick primer on how subalterns form outside of the hegemonic [...]

Footnote 85

See Chapter 13. To make the lesser (yet still significant) jump between innovators and early adopters you are going to need to involve Mavens among your innovators, and these Mavens will need to be interconnected. Return to Page

Footnote 84

See the Trend Growth figure in Chapter 1. The long tail, as an ecological space for memes, is broken up into four categories: Late Majority, Early Majority, Early Adopters, and Innovators. Return to Page

Footnote 83

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Footnote 82

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Footnote 81

Using flowscapes as described in the previous chapter. Return to Page

Footnote 80

“Be the change you want to see in the world.” – Mahatma Ghandi Return to Page

Footnote 79

Hermes, or Thoth, was not simply the god of magicians in Egyptian and Greek mythology. He was also god of writing, science, and judge of the dead. His counterpart, the goddess Ma’at, seems to have created Mathematics, but mathematics falls under the rulership of Thoth as well. Together, they both are anthropomorphized embodiments of the [...]

Footnote 78

Autopoiesis literally means “auto (self)-creation” (from the Greek: auto – αυτό for self- and poiesis – ποίησις for creation or production), and expresses a fundamental dialectic between structure and function. Return to Page

Footnote 77

The intelligence-increasing techniques of Dr. Wenger outlined in his book The Einstein Factor rely on the mechanism of balancing input and output by outliers, individuals who find fringes to weave together. Return to Page

Footnote 76

Edward de Bono‘s flowscaping is ideal for analyzing an institutional body and diagramming the internal organs of an egregore.. Return to Page

Footnote 75

One such software is the open source program Freemind, available on Sourceforge and there are a number of other not-so-free options out there as well. We prefer doing all of this by hand, however, and usually use pencils and graph paper. Return to Page

Footnote 74

A term coined by Saint John of the Cross in his poem “Dark Night of the Soul” from the 16th century. Return to Page

Footnote 73

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Footnote 72

One author spent a year avoiding advertisements as much as possible, while consciously removing or marking out any corporate logo present in his daily environment. This experiment led to a kind of hyper-awareness of logomancy and its otherwise subliminal effects, and led to a development of a personal theory about psychological space which went on [...]

Footnote 71

We continue to promote collage work throughout this book because collage, by arranging pieces made of pre-existing media with a variety of materials into a new cohesive whole, is the same process of trimming, selecting, and arranging from various available sources that the brain naturally utilizes to make sense of its environment as it develops. [...]

Footnote 70

Retroactive enchantment is one approach to achieving this goal, while specific forms of soul-retrieval can also be adapted to this kind of internal work. Friends have also adapted Dianetic auditing from scientology combined with self-hypnosis toward similar results. Return to Page

Footnote 69

As Fenwick Rysen put it: SIGIL –> SERVITOR –> EGREGORE –> GODFORM Mark Defrates essay, along with related material, is available at Chaos Matrix’s library. Return to Page

Footnote 68

In astrology, the rising sign is most closely associated with the persona, with the sun and moon signs roughly analogous to one’s conscious and pre-conscious self-image. Return to Page

Footnote 67

Protocol is the expectation of how to behave within a particular context, and is often attached to a physical space (in this example, the coffee shop is used as a memetic diagram of a group cluster.) Return to Page

Footnote 66

People buy not to own, but to join the ranks of those who own a specific product. Think Two Products Ahead and Triggers both explore how best to leverage this motivation. Return to Page

Footnote 65

For further reference on these magical techniques we’ve described, we recommend Phil Hine’s book Prime Chaos in which he explains Sorcery Event Series, and Taylor Elwood‘s Sigil Web explanation in the book Space/Time Magic. Return to Page

Footnote 64

And puts one in mind of Indra’s Web, or Hesse’s The Glass-Bead Game. Return to Page

Footnote 63

St. Mae and St. Fox presented Pranks at Esozone 2008, and used the term ‘Memetic Piggybacking’ to describe what we’ve identified as a viral metabiological process. If you are interested in learning more about memetic pranks, viral infictions, memetic contagions, click here. Return to Page

Footnote 62

Viral video is a recent development, having first made an impression in the search engines around 2005. Examining Google Trends for ‘Viral Video’ provides a real-world version of a meme adoption pattern. As producers heard about this idea of viral video, more and more came online looking for, as well as producing, viral video. The [...]

Footnote 61

Not to mention the countless black metal homages being paid to Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, and the various other crawly forces at the edge of math. H. P. Lovecraft’s mythos is a complex, interconnected fictional mastermind session that will not die. Return to Page

Footnote 60

Much more about using triggers can be found in Kevin Hogan’s book Covert Persuasion and Joseph Sugarman’s book Triggers. Dave Lakhani released his book on Persuasion after we’d completed the manuscript for The Art of Memetics, or we would have included it in our print edition’s bibliography. We include it here to rectify that oversight. [...]

Footnote 59

See Spare, A.O. “Automatic Writing” to begin. Spare is one of the most important proto-chaos magicians of the last hundred years, and his artwork lies not fully anchored in this plane. Return to Page

Footnote 58

Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator–Based on socionics, a typing system that Carl Jung worked on, and which breaks up personality along four axis. Popular within corporate cultures, human resources divisions, and various mentoring programs, and probably as a result there are numerous online quizzes which will analyze your responses to tell you your four-letter personality type. Return [...]

Footnote 57

Wilson, Robert A. (1990) Quantum Psychology is an important text, as well as Farrell, Nick (2005) Gathering the Magic in finding groups and understanding the effect joining a group can have on the self and one’s self-image. Return to Page

Footnote 56

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966) The Savage Mind provides the first reference to the importance of bricolage, although not the full application of it as a technique. Return to Page

Footnote 55

On a similar note, during the years from 1998 through until about 2004, I was exposed to an ongoing perpetual conversation within Astrology:1, one of the chat rooms at Yahoo.com —a chatroom that had a revolving cast of various chatters, and that often devolved into arguments and flame wars—it became obvious that the layer of [...]

Footnote 54

C. Harold, (2007) OurSpace – A brilliant treatment of the social movements that have flourished online, and the problematic nature of social value perceived as added capital. Return to Page

Footnote 53

R. Barthes, “Operation Margarine” in (1972) Mythologies Return to Page

Footnote 52

For an example of how ‘mere words’ can have a direct (yet unconscious) effect on physiology, see the episode in Blink by Malcolm Gladwell where the subject of a psychological experiment receives the hidden message of ‘old’ and moves slower as a result. Return to Page

Footnote 51

Edward witnessed an interaction very similar to the simplified description above. The more flexible male shut down his competitor to the point that the competitor developed a new option; he drank until he passed out and didn’t have to compete anymore. Return to Page

Footnote 50

Please bear in mind that we are not discounting his work, far from it. Thought Contagion, along with Richard Brodie’s Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme, are profoundly accessible works on the way that belief grows and manifests in culture. (Add MindControlMarketing and you’ve got the three books necessary to begin [...]

Footnote 49

One particularly relevant novel is Gibson, William (2003) Pattern Recognition Return to Page

Footnote 48

Read the chapter “Why Heather Can Write” in Jenkins, Henry (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide Return to Page

Footnote 47

Like the old joke goes, there’s 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary, and those who don’t. Return to Page

Footnote 46

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