Chimera
[Biology] 'A DNA molecule with sequences derived from two or more different organisms, formed by laboratory manipulation'.
Virus Neither dead nor alive. On its own it has just the capacity to sit there. It basically has two life streams, it can exist in a Symbiotic arrangement with a genestreme whereby the host and the virus get along famously. As a Parasite it beomes detrimental to the system it inhabits. [and there is the case of viruses just sitting there by the billions in our "Junk DNA" doing nothing currently discernible.] But the point is, it is not at that moment metabolising anything.
In all cases though the virus can be potentially immortal by existing in a condition in which it has the potential to replicate and or evolve.
The meaning of life, the metaverse and everything
There are 3 fundamental biological requirements for a thing to be described as alive.
[1] Containment All the packets, all the codes, all the cellular machinery needs to be contained in some type of vehicle. A cell, a strand of DNA, a strand of RNA, an ameoba, a viral packet.
[2] Metabolism This entity needs to be able to metabolise nutrient so that it has the capacity to sustain itself
[3] Hereditary It finally has to be capable of being acted upon by the forces of evolution. Whether it changes or not is another question.
As a hypothesis I argue that a multimedia meme, lets say a 'seed' aggregation of geo-referenced multimedia relating to Simpsons Gap, can be considered as a chimeric meme, [an evolving packet of cultural information] and that Mainstream marking and assessment techniques could be adjusted to allow students the heuristic advantages this style of growth orientated, collaborative learning allows. A meme can be considered [culturally,cognitively and digitally ] alive and capable of replication and evolution.
- Containment; it’s housed in a blog, say, and capable of being transported [and transformed/evolved] through a cultural system [Internet] via Web 2.0.
- Capable of metabolism [interacting constructively with existent information from it’s user and their readers], replication [copied to and used in other web 2.0 platforms].
- And subject to [cultural] evolutionary forces [the 'seed', via its user and her audience, has the capacity to attract and repulse other information, transforming itself in the process.]
Given suitable creative student interaction with the content it can become a useful, and therefore ‘evolving' packet of cultural information. Just like some of the clips on youtube that go viral, and spawn spinoffs.
Taste-Full
Now just as a example, a first try for me really, here's how I'd go about inducing someone into my discussion on the life and times of a meme.
First I'll provide some short 'Taste' as like an executive summary, then provide deeper information should the reader feel so motivated in the form of "Full", access to the entirety of the seed.
What’s in a meme Dorris?
Listen to this 1 min excerpt from Robyn Williams of ABC Radio National as he describes a meme that went viral in his high school days in England:
TASTE
Two loose Chimney Flue's Latrec!
FULL Now here is the podcast in its full 30 minutes play time
FULLERMEME 1 Susan Blackmore Video
Sue Blackmore on Memes and Temes.[video coming soon, heres the link to ted.com]
FULLERMEME 2- Textual Description of a Meme
About Memes
The term meme (it's pronounced like dream or cream) was coined by Richard Dawkins, Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. As examples he suggested “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches”.
Memes are habits, skills, songs, stories, or any other kind of information that is copied from person to person. Memes, like genes, are replicators. That is, they are information that is copied with variation and selection. Because only some of the variants survive, memes (and hence human cultures) evolve. Memes are copied by imitation, teaching and other methods, and they compete for space in our memories and for the chance to be copied again. Large groups of memes that are copied and passed on together are called co-adapted meme complexes, or memeplexes.
The word “meme” has recently been included in the Oxford English Dictionary where it is defined as follows “meme (mi:m), n. Biol. (shortened from mimeme ... that which is imitated, after GENE n.) “An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation”.
According to memetics, our minds and cultures are designed by natural selection acting on memes, just as organisms are designed by natural selection acting on genes. A central question for memetics is therefore ‘why has this meme survived?’. Some succeed because they are genuinely useful to us, while others use a variety of tricks to get themselves copied. From the point of view of the “selfish memes” all that matters is replication, regardless of the effect on either us or our genes.
Some memes are almost entirely exploitative, or viral, in nature, including chain letters and e-mail viruses. These consist of a “copy-me” instruction backed up with threats and promises. Religions have a similar structure and this is why Dawkins refers to them as ‘viruses of the mind’. Many religions threaten hell and damnation, promise heaven or salvation, and insist that their followers pass on their beliefs to others. This ensures the survival of the memeplex. Other viral memes include alternative therapies that don’t work, and new age fads and cults. Relatively harmless memes include children’s games, urban legends and popular songs, all of which can spread like infections.
At the other end of the spectrum memes survive because of their value to us. The most valuable of memeplexes include all of the arts and sports, transport and communications systems, political and monetary systems, literature and science.
Memetics has been used to provide new explanations of human evolution, including theories of altruism, the origins of language and consciousness, and the evolution of the large human brain. The Internet can be seen as a vast realm of memes, growing rapidly by the process of memetic evolution and not under human control.
The field of memetics is still a new and controversial science, with many critics, and many difficulties to be resolved.
FULLERMEME 3- Science Fiction
'SNOWCRASH' Neal Stephenson Publication date, June 1992.
Hiro Protagonist; freelance hacker who helped cut the code for the 'Metaverse' which is basically a 'Second Life' app. He's in the metaverse on his way into the virtual bar of 'The Black Sun' and fortunately decides against accepting and watching the 'Snowcrash' virus...[like watching snow on the screen of an old cathode ray TV] which turns folk into religious zealots, of a 'religion' fashioned by a media tycoon. The 'Hypercard', is/was a really clever old Mac program, which back in the 90's allowed one to dump all sorts of multimedia into a single file, a perfect repository to drop one of our current memes into.
Hiro realizes that the guy has noticed him and is staring back, looking him up and down, paying particular attention to the swords. A grin spreads across the black-and-white guy's face. It is a satisfied grin. A grin of recognition. The grin of a man who knows something Hiro doesn't. The black-and-white guy has been standing with his arms folded across his chest, like a man who is bored, who's been waiting for something, and now his arms drop to his sides, swing loosely at the shoulders, like an athlete limbering up. He steps as close as he can and leans forward; he's so tall that the only thing behind him is empty black sky, torn with the glowing vapor trails of passing animercials.
"Hey, Hiro," the black-and-white guy says, "you want to try some Snow Crash?"
A lot of people hang around in front of The Black Sun saying weird things. You ignore them. But this gets Hiro's attention.
Oddity the first: The guy knows Hiro's name. But people have ways of getting that information. It's probably nothing.
The second: This sounds like an offer from a drug pusher. Which would be normal in front of a Reality bar. But this is the Metaverse. And you can't sell drugs in the Metaverse, because you can't get high by looking at something.
The third: The name of the drug. Hiro's never heard of a drug called Snow Crash before. That's not unusual -- a thousand new drugs get invented each year, and each of them sells under half a dozen brand names.
But a "snow crash" is computer lingo. It means a system crash -- a bug -- at such a fundamental level that it frags the part of the computer that controls the electron beam in the monitor, making it spray wildly across the screen, turning the perfect gridwork of pixels into a gyrating blizzard. Hiro has seen it happen a million times. But it's a very peculiar name for a drug.
The thing that really gets Hiro's attention is his confidence. He has an utterly calm, stolid presence. It's like talking to an asteroid. Which would be okay if he were doing something that made the tiniest little bit of sense. Hiro's trying to read some clues in the guy's face, but the closer he looks, the more his shifty black-and-white avatar seems to break up into jittering, hard-edged pixels. It's like putting his nose against the glass of a busted TV. It makes his teeth hurt.
"Excuse me," Hiro says. "What did you say?"
"You want to try some Snow Crash?"
He has a crisp accent that Hiro can't quite place. His audio is as bad as his video. Hiro can hear cars going past the guy in the background. He must be goggled in from a public terminal alongside some freeway. "I don't get this," Hiro says. "What is Snow Crash?"
"It's a drug, asshole," the guy says. "What do you think?"
"Wait a minute. This is a new one on me," Hiro says. "You honestly think I'm going to give you some money here? And then what do I do, wait for you to mail me the stuff?"
"I said try, not buy," the guy says. "You don't have to give me any money. Free sample. And you don't have to wait for no mail. You can have it now." He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a hypercard.
It looks like a business card. The hypercard is an avatar of sorts. It is used in the Metaverse to represent a chunk of data. It might be text, audio, video, a still image, or any other information that can be represented digitally.
Think of a baseball card, which carries a picture, some text, and some numerical data. A baseball hypercard could contain a highlight film of the player in action, shown in perfect high-def television; a complete biography, read by the player himself, in stereo digital sound; and a complete statistical database along with specialized software to help you look up the numbers you want.
A hypercard can carry a virtually infinite amount of information. For all Hiro knows, this hypercard might contain all the books in the Library of Congress, or every episode of Hawaii Five-O that was ever filmed, or the complete recordings of Jimi Hendrix, or the 1950 Census.
Or -- more likely -- a wide variety of nasty computer viruses. If Hiro reaches out and takes the hypercard, then the data it represents will be transferred from this guy's system into Hiro's computer. Hiro, naturally, wouldn't touch it under any circumstances, any more than you would take a free syringe from a stranger in Times Square and jab it into your neck.
And it doesn't make sense anyway. "That's a hypercard. I thought you said Snow Crash was a drug," Hiro says, now totally nonplussed.
"It is," the guy says. "Try it."
"Does it fuck up your brain?" Hiro says. "Or your computer?"
"Both. Neither. What's the difference?"
Hiro finally realizes that he has just wasted sixty seconds of his life having a meaningless conversation with a paranoid schizophrenic. He turns around and goes into The Black Sun.
AND LATER
Hiro Protagonist talks to a ‘Gargoyle’ who explains how a meme virus works…
Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter. wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think they're talking to you, but they're actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is standing there measuring the length of Hiro's cock through his trousers while they pretend to make conversation.
"You're the guy who's working with Juanita, right?" Hiro says.
"Or she's working with me. Or something like that"
"She said she wanted me to meet you."
For several seconds Lagos is frozen. He's ransacking more data. Hiro wants to throw a bucket of water on him.
"Makes sense," he says. "You're as familiar with the Metaverse as anyone. Freelance hacker -- that's exactly right"
"Exactly right for what? No one wants freelance hackers anymore."
"The corporate assembly-line hackers are suckers for infection. They're going to go down by the thousands, just like Sennacherib's army before the walls of Jerusalem," Lagos says.
"Infection? Sennacherib?"
"And you can defend yourself in Reality, too -- that'll be good if you ever go up against Raven. Remember, his knives are as sharp as a molecule. They'll go through a bulletproof jacket like lingerie."
"Raven?"
"You'll probably see him tonight. Don't mess with him."
"Okay," Hiro says. "I'll look out for him."
"That's not what I said," Lagos says. "I said, don't mess with him."
"Why not?"
"It's a dangerous world," Lagos says. "Getting more dangerous all the time. So we don't want to upset the balance of terror. Just think about the Cold War."
"Yup." All Hiro wants to do now is walk away and never see this guy again, but he won't wind up the conversation.
"You're a hacker. That means you have deep structures to worry about, too."
"Deep structures?"
"Neurolinguistic pathways in your brain. Remember the first time you learned binary code?"
"Sure."
"You were forming pathways in your brain. Deep structures. Your nerves grow new connections as you use them -- the axons split and push their way between the dividing glial cells -- your bioware selfmodifies -- the software becomes part of the hardware. So now you're vulnerable -- all hackers are vulnerable -- to a nam-shub. We have to look out for each other."
"What's a nam-shub? Why am I vulnerable to it?"
"Just don't stare into any bitmaps. Anyone try to show you a raw bitmap lately? Like, in the Metaverse?"
Interesting. "Not to me personally, but now that you mention it, this Brandy came up to my friend --"
"A cult prostitute of Asherah. Trying to spread the disease. Which is synonymous with evil. Sound melodramatic? Not really. You know, to the Mesopotamians, there was no independent concept of evil. Just disease and ill health. Evil was a synonym for disease. So what does that tell you?"
Hiro walks away, the same way he walks away from psychotic street people who follow him down the street.
"It tells you that evil is a virus!" Lagos calls after him. "Don't let the nam-shub into your operating system!"
Juanita's working with this alien?
Blunt Force Trauma play for a solid hour, segueing from one song into the next with no chink or crevice in the wall of noise. All a part of the aesthetic. When the music stops, their set is over. For the first time, Hiro can hear the exaltation of the crowd. It's a blast of high-pitched noise that he feels in his head, ringing his ears.
