Colonizing Mind Space Information
- Evolution proceeds through mutation of genes.
- New genes appear.
- Some end up being better suited to changing realities.
- These new genes become selected and become the norm.
- Older organisms die out and become extinct.
- Some believe human cultures advance in a similar way.
- New memes (ideas, cultural forms) appear.
- Some are adopted because of their power.
- These new memes become the norms in culture.
- Older forms or abandoned and die out.
We could think of these new ideas as homesteads in cultural
evolution. They "colonize" mind space.
- The process is hard to see from inside. Old forms are comfortable
and do their work.
- New ideas can seem fanatic, alien, wild, fringe....
For a while, they are resisted and ridiculed.
- Art has often been the champion of these unorthodox ideas.
- The Web could accelerate the pace of cultural evolution by making it easy for new ideas to be published and spread from anywhere in the world.
- But many ideas really are dead ends and lead nowhere. How
can we tell which new ideas are the seeds of the future and which
are doorways to nowhere (dead meat)?
Conundrums for this event
- Many important new ideas do not appear on the Web.
- Even if they are on the Web, the people developing them do not
label them as strange, new, etc.
- The database of sites was generated using Web search engines.
Each search engine came up with mostly different sets of sites even
when the search was conducted on the same term. Undoubtedly,
important sites are being missed.
- Advertisers have appropriated the words "new", "radical", etc. so that many sites deal with newness that is trivial.
- Many ideas will be expressed in languages that the creators of this site don't understand.
Links for more information