Memes: Notes on Information Foraging and Attention

A while ago I read an older academic report (1999) by Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card entitled, "Information Foraging," which was cited in another periodical that I had read. It was a very slow read, but I think I was able to "mine" some good information from it to support some findings that I am working on for a proposed white paper.

Of interest was the following statement: "Not only do people adapt  to core complex information environments, but environments of information to which people adapt are themselves complex and dynamic." And D.C. Dennett in "Consciousness Explained" aptly characterized this scenario as using the notion of cultural knowledge units or  "memes" to do this, which was originally defined by  Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book "The Selfish Gene."  

        The strange thing here is that I have been doing much reading lately where the notion of "memes" keeps coming up. Although I read Dawkins' book as an undergraduate over 30 years ago — and in a very meme-like way (memetics) — it always amazes me that which comes around goes around.

And recently, Steven Hawkings wrote, in his book "The Grand Design" that: "Until the advent of modern physics it was generally thought that all knowledge of the world could be obtained through direct observation, that things are what they seem." So where does memetics fit into that equation?

Along with this, and at about the same time, I started to look at the concept of "attention." In my marketing class I have students focus on the concept of "permission marketing,"(Godin) and I try to get across the importance of attention in that process.  What we give our attention to is incredibly important to us as well as to those we share that resource.  If it happens to be a marketer, then that makes their day. We generally only allow this to happen if three conditions are met: anticipation, personal involvement and relevance (Godin).

Recently, NYU Professor, Clay Shirky, released a book called "Cognitive Surplus" where he said "that for decades, technology encouraged people to squander their time and intellect as passive consumers, but today, tech has finally caught up with human potential. In Cognitive Surplus, ... Shirky forecasts the thrilling changes we will all enjoy as new digital technology puts our untapped resources of talent and goodwill to use at last." (Amazon.com Editorial Review of "Cognitive Surplus") Or, another way to put it, how we monitor the change in our attention of the output that our social media environments are creating for us. Again, an allusion to paying attention through a selected format.

During my sabbatical reading period I read Winnifred Gallagher's book "Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life." Initially, I was interested in this book because she wrote of her battle with breast cancer.  But as I started to read this book, I realized that this book was so much more than a biography.  Gallagher says. "Your life is run ... by a group of bickering agents with different motives. (The voices in your head.) Where sticking to a goal is concerned, you can reduce the conflict by focusing on the most supportive voice and suppressing the distracting, counterproductive ones." Again this is about how we pay attention to the correct data or information in a self-serving, self-screening way. And by that I mean that this is yet another way to talk about "attention" — or focus, or not listening to the negative voices in our heads. This "interference" sometimes does not allow us to be "present" and therefore doesn't allow us to "see" the memes that are being generated all around us.

So, where are we? Or, what have we learned?

People adapt to informational environments. And cultural knowledge (memes) have a great deal to do with that adaptation. To understand memetic thought you have to pay attention. Paying attention requires some self-selection that has to meet three basic conditions: anticipation, personal involvement and relevance. Keeping focused means diluting the effect of distracting negative inner voices, which allows us to be "present" to that memetic process.

And you have to assume that success is intrinsically linked to cultural knowledge units (memes). For example, in the arena of social media when one realizes the importance of popular applications, such as Twitter, you could turn it into a full career, such as what Lauri Stevens (@lawscomm), Bill Gerth (@comcastcares) and Laura Fitton (@pistachio) have done.

As I said before: what comes around goes around. Memetics have been with us for a very long time and they are continually coming back to us through their use of our "cognitive surplus" in a variety of states and standards.

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Permission Marketing, Seth Godin, Simon and Schuster, 1999.

Rapt: Attention and the focused life, Winifred Gallagher, The Penguin Press, 2009. 

The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition, Richard Dawkins, Oxford University Press, 2006.