I don’t really remember how I got there, but I ended up at memepool, the brainchild of del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter and Jeff Smith. Posted on January 5th, 2006, was an entry which read:

The popularity of 50 Cent has given rise to spin-offs that range from Jewish Hip-Hop to 80s Pop mixups.

Hey, I’m always on the look out for more quality Jewish Hip Hop, so I followed the link to the website of Aviad Cohen, aka 50 Shekel (the shekel is the standard of currency in Israel, hence the connection to 50 Cent). His splash page looked earnestly Jewish, almost too much so. Clicking on the enter site link, it became quite obvious that Aviad-Cohen-50-Shekel is a Jew for Jesus. I don’t really want to get into a discussion on Jewish identity, and I have a fairly liberal perspective, but I have a distrust of proselytizing ministers who claim to have a direct mandate from God (and, by the way, ask for prayers and money to support his mission and to buy, among other things, a video iPod).

It seems very likely that pjammer didn’t even follow the “enter site” link. The photo of Aviad in a “Jesus/King of Kings” graphic tee or the link to Jesus-Is-Savior (”get schooled quick”) would have sent up a few red flags to even the most unknowledgeable goy.

To get on track with the underlying moral (as looking back at my writing, many of my posts have at least one), it seems that memepool is concerned with getting “memes” out, linking out to, being linked to. This is what I’d attribute to the Google Effect — with its relevence-based search ranking, using measures of link and traffic intensity — and it has had a measurable influence on the blogosphere (check out Francine’s 4 months of blogging… for a very nicely written and honest retrospective of blogging as a practice tightly intertwined with the ego).

What are memes, these things with which memepool is so concerned? A meme is defined by Wiktionary as, “a unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.” I had mentioned memes earlier in passing, without really delving much deeper. Jason Godesky of the Anthropik Network describes memetics with an example that just makes sense:

The term was first introduced by Richard Dawkins in his 1978 classic, The Selfish Gene, where Dawkins ended with a discussion of humanity’s ability to adapt culturally. Cultural adaptation works many times faster than biological adaptation; a man can sew a sweater in far less time than it will take natural selection to make his great-great-grandchildren hairier. This cultural adaptation has given humanity an adaptiveness and evolutionary fitness rivaled in the animal kingdom only by cockroaches.

So we pass on memes because culture is adaptable in a more efficient and far-flung manner than biology (unless you’re a fruitfly). Most of the time, these memes are passed either laterally or down the generations tacitly through modeling. Unless one stops and thinks about it, the average person really doesn’t have a cogent reason for wearing sweaters in the winter (at least, we in New England wear sweaters in the winter — for now). Other memes are spread intentionally and explicitly, like those on memepool. While I have no evidence to back this up, it seems that the more explicit the meme in a time of relative stability, i.e., when adaptation doesn’t need to occur, the less likely the meme has to do with survival. Following this thought through, the explicit transmission of “junk memes” leads to an apparent trivialization of cultural adaptation.

If we consider the analogue of junk memes in DNA, junk genes mean that scientists don’t know what they do. The same could be said, really, for these junk memes.

For 2006’s World Question Center, The Edge posed, “What is your dangerous idea?” This question elicited some interesting responses, but the two I was drawn to the most were listed on pages 7 and 8. Harvard’s Daniel Gilbert wrote:

Dangerous does not mean exciting or bold. It means likely to cause great harm. The most dangerous idea is the only dangerous idea: The idea that ideas can be dangerous.

Similarly, physicist and computer scientist W. Daniel Hillis wrote,

I don’t share my most dangerous ideas. Ideas are the most powerful forces that we can unleash upon the world, and they should not be let loose without careful consideration of their consequences. Some ideas are dangerous because they are false, like an idea that one race of humans is more worthy that another, or that one religion has monopoly on the truth. False ideas like these spread like wildfire, and have caused immeasurable harm. They still do. Such false ideas should obviously not be spread or encouraged, but there are also plenty of trues idea that should not be spread: ideas about how to cause terror and pain and chaos, ideas of how to better convince people of things that are not true.

Incompletely and inaccurately labeling 50 Shekel as Jewish — rather than as a Jew for Jesus — probably isn’t going to start a war, cause widespread suffering, or the like; however, a seemingly innocuous meme has the potential to be dangerous in some yet unknown way. The danger will probably only be apparent in retrospect. So, in conclusion, isn’t it important to be mindful of the information and memes we explicitly pass on, and aware of its’ potential to bring about good as well as its’ potential to be dangerous?

If we aren’t mindful of this binary potentiality as memetic receivers and transmitters, as learners and teachers, someone else probably already is, and is willing to use this awareness not for the survival of the many, but for the benefit of the few.

• Joanna Weiss predicts that 2005 will mark the beginning of the end of serendipity.
• George Siemens is grappling with the nature of meaning making, learning, and subjectivity.
• Doug of Borderland is searching for a “broadened conceptualization of curriculum.”
• Lisa Lynch and Bob Stein of the Institute for the Future of the Book consider Wikipedia’s potential commercial turn, whether out of subversive necessity or categorical design.
• Meta of metas, Ulises Ali Mejias reports on using social software to teach about social software.
• Jason Godesky meditates on the true (truer?) meanings and implications of memetics.
• Can an ultimate theory of Lost really be found, and will the boys from South Park, Colorado, ever grow up?

Happy New Year, and I hope 2006 brings a sense of satisfaction in the search, whatever you are looking for, to everyone.

This is the first in an occasional series in which I hope to develop an argument for the continued development of critical literacy skills in “new media.” I am hoping to argue that it is not enough to grapple with the products and artifacts of these new media as “media types” (e.g., video, audio, animation, etc.), but it is also necessary to be mindful of an epistemology in process, made all the more difficult for many of us because of its distributed and emergent nature rife with uncertainty and indistinctness. We must neither reject these ideas out of hand nor accept them with nary a critical mind; instead, it is my hope to be open to new ideas, learn from past experiences — both philosophically and empirically — and work for a better future.

Looking for extremes in a discussion and then working toward a more tenable position can be instructive. Recently, Wikipedia has been batted about and criticized for issues concerning accuracy. As Wikipedia has become an important — if not always consistent — source of information for many learners and educators, it’s worth considering what’s going on. Surveying the blogosphere for takes on the Wikipedia debate, here are two opinions:

Both positions shed some light on the issues; the premise of Wikipedia, verification through community regulation, may not be “authoritative” in the traditional, centralized sense, but there is value to this form of emergent meaning making. As Umberto Eco writes in Serendipties: Language and Lunacy, “After all, the cultivated person’s first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.” In a sense, Wikipedia has been fairly successful. Despite, or maybe because of, the range of contributors, the journal Nature has found that Wikipedia is almost as accurate as the print-standard Britannica).

Yet questions still linger. The duality of authority and certainty are difficult concepts from which to break away. So much of the Western philosophical tradition has craved expressions of predictability that it is difficult to disambiguate these constructs from one’s own sense of self; it is almost as if it is human nature to accept what is “written” in one form or another.

I agree with Nicholas Carr that Wikipedia is not in many senses an “encyclopedia;” it is more a successful example of object-centered sociality. Thinking about Wikipedia as an example of object-centered sociality helps to realign what is considered when reading an article on the site. Whereas there is a certain amount of trust given to publishers to find appropriate authors for articles, no such guarantee exists with community-driven information sites like Wikipedia. It is important, therefore, to think about how the article you are reading emerged into its’ current state. Wikipedia provides two tools for discerning this process: the “discussion” and “history” tabs. Clicking on these tabs will provide you with a window to the communal thought process that results in the articles we read on Wikipedia. At least one person has lamented that knowledgeable potential contributors have only contributed to the discussion and not the article itself. As an encyclopedia, the behavior is to be admonished; as an example of object-centered sociality, this is a legitimate form of participation. Readers of Wikipedia should be aware of this range of legitimate participation, from authoring, to editing, to discussing.

It is useful in discerning “truth” and meaning in Wikipedia to consider the tensions between what is written in the article and the discussions and edits which occur more-or-less behind the scenes (unless you are in the know). It would be an interesting exercise to develop an interface for Wikipedia where the discussions and edit histories are more up-front, formatted more like a page of Talmud than like a page of Britannica. Jews have been dealing with this emergent form of meaning making for centuries (full disclosure: I am Jewish). As Joann Sfar writes in the graphic novel The Rabbi’s Cat,

Westerners want to resolve the world. Turn multiplicity into oneness. That’s a delusion, says the rabbi.
Cat: But, master, doesn’t Judaism also try to turn multiplicity into oneness?
Rabbi: Yes. But not in the same way…. Western thought works by thesis, antithesis, synthesis, while Judaism goes thesis, antithesis, antithesis, antithesis….

In any case, the tensions between accuracy, discussion, and emergence highlight the continual need for critical literacies; given the changing nature of these information sources, however, the necessary skills are slightly different. Let’s continue to delve deeper into this discussion over time.

How much respect can you have for something you refuse to criticize?

Often in the blogosphere it seems that new ideas and practices are touted, celebrated, embraced, and sometimes even followed with a very short — or even non-existent — period of reflection and criticism. Peter Ford refers to this phenomenon as the “edu-blogging echo chamber.” To critique something, when done without malicious intent, is a call for an extended dialogue; it seems like that can only help bring about that open exchange of ideas in order to better the world at large.

Apparently, I’m not. I found this wonderful podcast, The Myth of Multi-Tasking. Merlin Mann of 43Folders posits that when one says they are multitasking, they are really just slicing their attention into smaller and smaller chunks. It is well worth listening to the podcast (it is on the short side), he talks about the self-perceived ability to multitask:

We’ve really been habituated over the years to thinking of ourselves, we should basically be these parallel processing computers and our conscience mind should be able to be in ten places at once….

There is alot of pressure to “multitask.” I’ve even been described by a former supervisor as a good multitasker. But I still feel quite overwhelmed, so Merlin’s podcast really speaks to me.

So is there any scientific basis behind Merlin’s astute observations? As a matter of fact, there is. I did a little digging and found the report Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Provides New Constraints on Theories of the Psychological Refractory Period associated with an American Psychological Society’s press release entitled We Weren’t Made to Multitask. It turns out that Merlin’s observations are actually validated by fMRI studies; as a person moves back-and-forth between tasks in a “multitasking” environment, they are “passive-queuing” the unfocused tasks rather than “active-monitoring.” The authors further discovered,

…no increase in the sort of activity that would be involved in keeping two thought processes separate when subjects had to switch faster. This suggests that there are no complicated mechanisms that allow people to perform two tasks at once. Instead, we have to perform the next task only after the last one is finished.

Could it be that even slicing our attention into tiny little slices could be detrimental to the task at hand? Likely, as the more we switch, the more we passively queue — rather than actively — engage with the task. This, I believe, has an impact as to how we approach learning and teaching, as we look for ways to encourage active learning.

But for us as people, Merlin gently reminds us,

…once you realize you can only ever do one thing at a time, an amazing thing happens. You discover that all this anxiety that has been acting as a spackle in your brain to turn all of your tasks into one ginormous task, the anxiety goes away. Suddenly, the tasks break down back into the single activities that they really are. And your brain spends more time on creative efforts instead of generating more anxiety for that monster in your head. And that can be really powerful.