Welcome to all
As I've been tinkering with the tools I want to use for my upcoming Ph.D research (mainly online tools like content management systems, blogs, bookmarking services etc), I've also been doing a lot of thinking about what the first post on this new research blog should be. Some fascinating and perfectly worded explanation about the goals of the project, something polished and preferably very impressive to any future reader who might raffle through older blog posts to see how this all began.
But one of the cornerstones of the project (which I promise to explain at a later point) is that I want my thinking to be as inclusive as possible. For the past few months I've been giving a lot of thought to methodology, a concept of which I was woefully unaware up until not so long ago. As realization of the possibilities of framing my research into previously-unknown methodological frameworks set in, my mind made that kind of leap that is small for mankind but rather great for a single person: I began noticing an enormous number of connections between ideas and pieces of information that had appeared completely disparate up until then. Presumably I'll get better at weeding out figments of my imagination from actual connections, but for the time being, I want to jot down anything that feels important. At this very moment, after midnight and well past my bedtime, I want to write about something I just saw that was absolutely intriguing. It has little or nothing to do with fanwork at first glance. But I'm quite certain I'll see a link after sleeping on it a bit. So, first post about something random -I'm sure it'll be much more characteristic of the rest of this project than any elaborately composed text could be.
Now, I just stumbled upon a TED speech by Susan Blackmore about the driving influence of memes on the evolution of the human species. (This is why it's so fascinating to go foraging into research specialities that are apparently unrelated to your own. I don't know a thing about evolution or any of the concepts underpinning it, and I've never tried to think in terminology that might be used in evolutionary biology or whatnot. This is the first time since all those childhood dinosaur books that I've thought of myself as a member of a 'species'. It makes me feel like a machine, an idea that certainly holds a grain of truth, but I've never been nudged to contemplate it. I'm typing it out because otherwise I'll have forgotten tomorrow morning, and I might not contemplate it again for another fifteen years, which would be a great shame.)
Regardless, that meme talk. I blogged about memes for the Let's Manga project once, a while ago, during the time of the 'nice boat' incident. An anime broadcast was canceled because someone had committed a grisly murder in a manner that resembled the violent antics of the anime's characters. Instead of the episode, the network aired classical music and images of peaceful landscapes and castles. One image, that of a ferry gliding over a lake, gave birth to the 'nice boat' meme -something that anime fans said to each other to refer to the incident and perhaps mock the network's censorship. 2channel, Japan's biggest online bulletin board, had pages of hundreds of people posting messages that consisted only of 'NICE BOAT'. It was funny, and also a little scary.
In her talk, Susan Blackmore suggests that much of our evolution has been driven by memes -the copying of something, in our case the copying of a certain behaviour from one person to another. She made the point that this process has put the human species as a whole in great danger in the past, something I'm not going to get into now -go watch the video. What captivated me was the idea that not only do we appear to be evolving by way of a very risky copying process, we've gone and made it even more dangerous by adding technology to the mix. While technology is not yet so advanced that it can copy itself, it certainly appears to have a modicum of intelligence, something worth copying. So we copy. Not only by putting bits of technology in our bodies, but by modeling our behaviour after the examples set to us by machinery. (This isn't entirely what Blackmore said anymore. It's veering off into fatigue-addled personal interpretation/ranting. I don't mean to put words in her mouth - go watch the video.)
It's so very easy to imagine that my general behaviour -working until ungodly hours of the night, craving the input of more interesting bits of information more than social interaction with real-life friends, endlessly tinkering behind my computer screen in a constant bid to improve the way I process the heaps of information, to do's, and other fascinating nasties that either come my way or that I create myself- is something that was unconsciously 'copied' from the being that I spend the most time interacting with -my laptop. This seems to make sense.
What made an impression here, I believe, is that the general scariness of the ideas Blackmore suggests reminded me of that chanting of 'NICE BOAT'. In what sense, I'll ask myself tomorrow. Signing off.
But one of the cornerstones of the project (which I promise to explain at a later point) is that I want my thinking to be as inclusive as possible. For the past few months I've been giving a lot of thought to methodology, a concept of which I was woefully unaware up until not so long ago. As realization of the possibilities of framing my research into previously-unknown methodological frameworks set in, my mind made that kind of leap that is small for mankind but rather great for a single person: I began noticing an enormous number of connections between ideas and pieces of information that had appeared completely disparate up until then. Presumably I'll get better at weeding out figments of my imagination from actual connections, but for the time being, I want to jot down anything that feels important. At this very moment, after midnight and well past my bedtime, I want to write about something I just saw that was absolutely intriguing. It has little or nothing to do with fanwork at first glance. But I'm quite certain I'll see a link after sleeping on it a bit. So, first post about something random -I'm sure it'll be much more characteristic of the rest of this project than any elaborately composed text could be.
Now, I just stumbled upon a TED speech by Susan Blackmore about the driving influence of memes on the evolution of the human species. (This is why it's so fascinating to go foraging into research specialities that are apparently unrelated to your own. I don't know a thing about evolution or any of the concepts underpinning it, and I've never tried to think in terminology that might be used in evolutionary biology or whatnot. This is the first time since all those childhood dinosaur books that I've thought of myself as a member of a 'species'. It makes me feel like a machine, an idea that certainly holds a grain of truth, but I've never been nudged to contemplate it. I'm typing it out because otherwise I'll have forgotten tomorrow morning, and I might not contemplate it again for another fifteen years, which would be a great shame.)
Regardless, that meme talk. I blogged about memes for the Let's Manga project once, a while ago, during the time of the 'nice boat' incident. An anime broadcast was canceled because someone had committed a grisly murder in a manner that resembled the violent antics of the anime's characters. Instead of the episode, the network aired classical music and images of peaceful landscapes and castles. One image, that of a ferry gliding over a lake, gave birth to the 'nice boat' meme -something that anime fans said to each other to refer to the incident and perhaps mock the network's censorship. 2channel, Japan's biggest online bulletin board, had pages of hundreds of people posting messages that consisted only of 'NICE BOAT'. It was funny, and also a little scary.
In her talk, Susan Blackmore suggests that much of our evolution has been driven by memes -the copying of something, in our case the copying of a certain behaviour from one person to another. She made the point that this process has put the human species as a whole in great danger in the past, something I'm not going to get into now -go watch the video. What captivated me was the idea that not only do we appear to be evolving by way of a very risky copying process, we've gone and made it even more dangerous by adding technology to the mix. While technology is not yet so advanced that it can copy itself, it certainly appears to have a modicum of intelligence, something worth copying. So we copy. Not only by putting bits of technology in our bodies, but by modeling our behaviour after the examples set to us by machinery. (This isn't entirely what Blackmore said anymore. It's veering off into fatigue-addled personal interpretation/ranting. I don't mean to put words in her mouth - go watch the video.)
It's so very easy to imagine that my general behaviour -working until ungodly hours of the night, craving the input of more interesting bits of information more than social interaction with real-life friends, endlessly tinkering behind my computer screen in a constant bid to improve the way I process the heaps of information, to do's, and other fascinating nasties that either come my way or that I create myself- is something that was unconsciously 'copied' from the being that I spend the most time interacting with -my laptop. This seems to make sense.
What made an impression here, I believe, is that the general scariness of the ideas Blackmore suggests reminded me of that chanting of 'NICE BOAT'. In what sense, I'll ask myself tomorrow. Signing off.