Relevant to my interests.
Anthropologist develops system to catalog religions and cults by the frequency and arousal of their rituals.
World's only employed undergraduate-level anthropologist.
J.K. Rowling: The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination
On Language: Cellar Door.
Before I begin, I’d like to state that I’m in no way qualified to talk about anything in the body of this post. I have neither the education nor the authority. Everything herein should be labeled conjecture, if it’s worthy even of that.
I recently started listening to a lecture given by Greg Niemeyer, assistant professor of new media at Berkeley. In this lecture he shares an anecdote about tamagotchis. Tamagotchis were a kind of primitive digital pet that came in the form of a simple computer in an egg-shaped casing with three buttons. These buttons allowed the user to check the status of the tamagotchi, play with the tamagotchi, feed it, and clean up its mess. During the height of the tamagotchi craze, all the students at his kid’s school obsessed over them throughout the day. In reaction to this distraction, the school administration banned tamagotchi use. This was fine, until on a given day, one of the tamagotchis “died”. The owner of the particular tamagotchi had a breakdown, and kids started having panic attacks. Parents threatened to sue over emotional duress, and the school relented, hiring a person whose sole job was to care for the tamagotchi throughout the school day, making sure they were fed.
I mentioned this anecdote to several friends and the initial reaction is always the same. The event was ludicrous, the parents were irresponsible and stupid, and the children were being brats. This seems like the prevailing attitude amongst people of my generation (and older) towards this phenomenon, but if we dress the problem in more familiar, but nevertheless relatively exchangeable elements, I think people see the event in a different light. The greatest leap here is that in one the outcome requires passive action (deliberate inaction), and in the other, deliberate action. Let’s consider the same situation, but replace tamagotchis with dolls, and the enforcement of separation, which leads to “death” (or destruction, more appropriately), with a willful destruction of the direct, physical object (like say, cutting off a doll’s head). Children form relationships with artificial objects (as do adults, but more on that later) by endowing them with whatever traits are appealing to them (the extreme of this being a non-existent object; the insubstantial imaginary friend). Dolls are good receptacles for this kind of attachment because they do part of the work, which helps complete an illusion of limited autonomy - their appearance is predetermined before it gets to the child, therefore the child, short of taking action towards aesthetic changes, endows the object mostly with insubstantial traits that make that one particular doll (out of a large pool) have significance. This process is a sort of relationship building, which with time is reinforced with a shared history. Most of us could probably agree that causing the destruction of a child’s favorite doll would be an unjustifiable, cruel act. But most of us fail to see the same significance in the case of the tamagotchis. To me it seems that the case of the tamagotchi is graver still, because it offers up a false “intelligence” by giving the child a “pet” that has expressive behavioral traits. The tamagotchi does more work in filling in the complete picture, which in turn leads the child to regard it as a more autonomous being. Besides that, the tamagotchi, like the child, likes to play, needs to be fed, cared for, and in same cases, disciplined. The tamagotchi is not just a friend, or a pet, but a lower form of “child”, which forces a certain set of responsibilities on the user, if they’re to engage in the use of one to begin with. Both a doll and the tamagotchi fall into a similar category of use, and purpose, but the main difference between the two is time. We have evidence of dolls found in Egyptian tombs dating as far back as 2000 BCE. The tamagotchi has been around since 1996. Our culture has not had the time to contextualize the tamagotchi, or to form a baseline of what constitutes appropriate engagement/investment with one. Due to this, the response most of us are left with is a reactionary one - this product is stupid and artificial, and it is unacceptable that people form meaningful relationships with them. That is, we view the phenomenon as something belonging in the realm of the absurd.
And this gets me to my main concern for the past week or two, the acceleration of culture.
Biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in 1976 to refer to a unit of cultural information that can be propagated from mind to mind in a manner similar to how genes are propagated - that is, there is a sort of natural selection that occurs while the meme (tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches, etc.) is being shared. With the assistance of computers for the formulation and structuring of ideas, and the Internet as a connected dispersal grounds, ideas have a circulation and reach that was heretofore unattainable. These two elements have created a mechanism that allows for an idea to experience an accelerated life cycle. The idea is created, dropped on the Internet (through personal/commercial websites, blogs, vlogs, self-help pieces, and mediated interactions [chats {text, auditory, visual}, VoIP, etc.]) as it is filtered and propagated by numerous minds, it transforms, keeping the most appealing qualities (the attractive qualities that make people want to share the idea), and added to in order to become more effectively viral in its propagation, similar to how the account of a real event can become rumor. The difference now is that the Internet keeps a semi-permanent, easily accessible archive, and that due to its connectivity, it creates a sort of economy of scale - there are more ideas, so they’re less valuable, so they’re less likely to survive, and the ones that do survive have the most appealing qualities and are thus the easiest to share.
Been thinking a lot about slavery lately. Will try to put something up about that later.
World's only employed undergraduate-level anthropologist.
J.K. Rowling: The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination
On Language: Cellar Door.
Before I begin, I’d like to state that I’m in no way qualified to talk about anything in the body of this post. I have neither the education nor the authority. Everything herein should be labeled conjecture, if it’s worthy even of that.
I recently started listening to a lecture given by Greg Niemeyer, assistant professor of new media at Berkeley. In this lecture he shares an anecdote about tamagotchis. Tamagotchis were a kind of primitive digital pet that came in the form of a simple computer in an egg-shaped casing with three buttons. These buttons allowed the user to check the status of the tamagotchi, play with the tamagotchi, feed it, and clean up its mess. During the height of the tamagotchi craze, all the students at his kid’s school obsessed over them throughout the day. In reaction to this distraction, the school administration banned tamagotchi use. This was fine, until on a given day, one of the tamagotchis “died”. The owner of the particular tamagotchi had a breakdown, and kids started having panic attacks. Parents threatened to sue over emotional duress, and the school relented, hiring a person whose sole job was to care for the tamagotchi throughout the school day, making sure they were fed.
I mentioned this anecdote to several friends and the initial reaction is always the same. The event was ludicrous, the parents were irresponsible and stupid, and the children were being brats. This seems like the prevailing attitude amongst people of my generation (and older) towards this phenomenon, but if we dress the problem in more familiar, but nevertheless relatively exchangeable elements, I think people see the event in a different light. The greatest leap here is that in one the outcome requires passive action (deliberate inaction), and in the other, deliberate action. Let’s consider the same situation, but replace tamagotchis with dolls, and the enforcement of separation, which leads to “death” (or destruction, more appropriately), with a willful destruction of the direct, physical object (like say, cutting off a doll’s head). Children form relationships with artificial objects (as do adults, but more on that later) by endowing them with whatever traits are appealing to them (the extreme of this being a non-existent object; the insubstantial imaginary friend). Dolls are good receptacles for this kind of attachment because they do part of the work, which helps complete an illusion of limited autonomy - their appearance is predetermined before it gets to the child, therefore the child, short of taking action towards aesthetic changes, endows the object mostly with insubstantial traits that make that one particular doll (out of a large pool) have significance. This process is a sort of relationship building, which with time is reinforced with a shared history. Most of us could probably agree that causing the destruction of a child’s favorite doll would be an unjustifiable, cruel act. But most of us fail to see the same significance in the case of the tamagotchis. To me it seems that the case of the tamagotchi is graver still, because it offers up a false “intelligence” by giving the child a “pet” that has expressive behavioral traits. The tamagotchi does more work in filling in the complete picture, which in turn leads the child to regard it as a more autonomous being. Besides that, the tamagotchi, like the child, likes to play, needs to be fed, cared for, and in same cases, disciplined. The tamagotchi is not just a friend, or a pet, but a lower form of “child”, which forces a certain set of responsibilities on the user, if they’re to engage in the use of one to begin with. Both a doll and the tamagotchi fall into a similar category of use, and purpose, but the main difference between the two is time. We have evidence of dolls found in Egyptian tombs dating as far back as 2000 BCE. The tamagotchi has been around since 1996. Our culture has not had the time to contextualize the tamagotchi, or to form a baseline of what constitutes appropriate engagement/investment with one. Due to this, the response most of us are left with is a reactionary one - this product is stupid and artificial, and it is unacceptable that people form meaningful relationships with them. That is, we view the phenomenon as something belonging in the realm of the absurd.
And this gets me to my main concern for the past week or two, the acceleration of culture.
Biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in 1976 to refer to a unit of cultural information that can be propagated from mind to mind in a manner similar to how genes are propagated - that is, there is a sort of natural selection that occurs while the meme (tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches, etc.) is being shared. With the assistance of computers for the formulation and structuring of ideas, and the Internet as a connected dispersal grounds, ideas have a circulation and reach that was heretofore unattainable. These two elements have created a mechanism that allows for an idea to experience an accelerated life cycle. The idea is created, dropped on the Internet (through personal/commercial websites, blogs, vlogs, self-help pieces, and mediated interactions [chats {text, auditory, visual}, VoIP, etc.]) as it is filtered and propagated by numerous minds, it transforms, keeping the most appealing qualities (the attractive qualities that make people want to share the idea), and added to in order to become more effectively viral in its propagation, similar to how the account of a real event can become rumor. The difference now is that the Internet keeps a semi-permanent, easily accessible archive, and that due to its connectivity, it creates a sort of economy of scale - there are more ideas, so they’re less valuable, so they’re less likely to survive, and the ones that do survive have the most appealing qualities and are thus the easiest to share.
Been thinking a lot about slavery lately. Will try to put something up about that later.