Cyborgs and Memes
Much has been discussed recently about how we are becoming cyborgs merely by the fact that we are connected to others through the internet. Our keyboards and screens are our connections to the collective and the social networking sites we are members of are our filters to the wider internet. The more connected we become, the more withdrawal symptoms we face when we are disconnected. It becomes difficult to become removed from the collective not because we are addicted to the internet in itself, and not because we miss the people we connect to through it (we can always phone or visit them) but because those people we connect to provide us with something more.
The people we connect to online become not just friends and colleagues they become an extra pair of eyes, ears, minds and memories. The information coming through 100 people we follow on Twitter is as though it came from us. It is stored in collective memory, and if it isn’t cached locally (in your own brain) it is still available in somebody else’s brain or on the network itself. It is filtered by the person posting it, which if our local network is fully trusted, avoids the necessity to filter it ourselves. Even if out network isn’t fully trusted, most of the content coming in through it is unlikely to be malicious and so simple rather than complete filtering can be used.
There is of course also more raw information and data online which we as individuals seek out and then share with the network. Here it is us that is doing the filtering and initial processing, which others then accept more readily than if had come from some unknown source. It is important not to abuse this trust, otherwise we get become disconnected from the network. Where computer networks suffer from viruses, and biological networks (close friends, perhaps even sharing bodily fluids) suffer from disease and infection, the social or cyborg network suffers from memes. Because each one of us is more trusted than the wider internet, the memes we bring are more readily accepted and reproduce more easily. These memes can be be benign ideas and statements, or they can be something more politically and culturally changing.
Our networks will have formed by finding people harboring and sharing certain types of memes, which along with the fact that nodes on our network are more trusted than other nodes on the internet, means we become particularly susceptible to new memes introduced by members of our network. For example it has often been stated that kanban software development is catching, and that when one person or group start using it other close by groups do too. This isn’t just because kanban is a great tool for software development (though obviously I’m biased) it’s because a tool (or meme) introduced by trusted network members is far less likely to be rejected than a tool introduced from elsewhere.
Now that we understand the transfer of memes throughout our network better we can more readily control them. By taking measures to remove network members introducing bad (or even malicious) memes we protect not only ourselves but the rest of the network that connect to us. By understanding how the transfer of memes work we can start introducing good memes, those that improve ourselves and society as a whole, and have them more easily accepted. It has been said that Moore’s Law still continues to hold true not because of some inherent physical properties of silicon, but because we believe it to still hold true and therefore work towards keeping it going; imagine if we believed, and I mean really really believed, that society would continue to exponentially improve.
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