This is happening everywhere. We're being made more and more homogeneous. The same applies to other aspects of our life, e.g. music, films etc. The general rule is what is popular is safer, so it's being promoted more. In this case what is less popular is not even given a chance to surface - no matter if it's popular radio or YouTube recommendations.
I feel like we are becoming less homogeneous. When I was a kid everyone watched cable television after dinner and everyone watched all of the same shows. Thursday night was Friends. Friday night was Full House and Family Matters, etc. Now I find everyone I know watches all kinds of shows, many of which I've never even heard of. Not to mention YouTube which is whole new layers upon layers of content. In an odd way, I actually kind of miss the "bonding" cable television used to give the populace (but not really).
I just chose shows as an example. But I feel the same happens with reading, music, technology, politics, etc.
Personally I think you’re both right. We are becoming less homogeneous as a society, but the people within those subgroups interact much less than they used to, at least in person.
Yes, I think this is an accurate observation. There seems to be more variation on the fringe and more homogeneity closer to the center (or over large areas).
Thanks for this. Sometimes I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I read something about how some thing or another is worse today than it was "back in the day". It basically never meshes with my experience of that time.
Local musical scenes used to have their own sounds, but thier influence has fallen away to more distant influences. If we all listened to POP top 20, then this would have homogenized music. Instead, there is much more variety and musical subcultures than ever before.
Globalised phenomena (Cola, Marvel, McDonald’s) can have localized meanings (trashy/hyped/cool/classy/masculine/feminine). It’s not an either/or thing. In sociology this is dubbed glocalization.
that is watering down the point i think. with companies becoming more and more like amazon, google, and apple, who care about statistics than individual customers, and many, many other aspects of modern society, we are just turning humans into numbers. everything we do is channeled and controlled, which isn’t negated by mcdonalds serving dim sum or whatever in china or other “glocalizations”.
It might be the way around. This kind of intellectual homogenization might indicate an emergent entity coming to being - some kind of (new?) societal organism, sort of like national state, but I don't know what it actually is this time. We might never learn.
An ant is a phenomenon that emerges from the interaction of genes as they react to the environment in the same way that an anthill is emergent from the collective behavior of the individual ants as they react to the environment.
Memes would be the basic building blocks of any organism that emerged from the manner in which replicated ideas collectively reacted to the environment. Arguably this describes human culture, though I think that's a long way from exhibiting independent intelligence (but maybe we'd be incapable of recognizing it).
Presumably something could emerge from the collective interaction of such meme-based organisms. Though like with ants, where the phenomena of an anthill can also be understood directly in terms of genes (all the ants are siblings), I suspect it could really just be reduced to the interplay of mutually reinforcing memes.
I wonder what the analog to delineating the internal and external environment is in the meme-based universe....
It's funny that you use those examples. In 'The Selfish Gene' where the term 'meme' originated, it's used to describe any 'things' that Darwinian forces act on. So things that persist and spread in the way that genes do, but aren't genes.
One of the examples used to illustrate the point was beavers' dams. So 'meme' always did exactly mean persistent phenomena like anthills and tuna shoals (although 'collective animals' would be a subcategory, it referred to more than just those). The word has recently been semantically narrowed into meaning 'a picture on the internet with some words on it'; sadly, in my opinion. The original meaning was much more interesting and useful as it ties in with Darwinism, or the theory of evolution applied more broadly and to things which aren't necessarily biological organisms.
Apparently Dawkins isn't bothered by it himself though and likes the current usage (or so I read somewhere).
I feel these constructs were always present (compare the behavior of a pack of wolves vs a lone wolf) but in our age they're large reinforced by the "pack" being orders of magnitude larger. See how lynch works in social media: someone gets accused of something, then an army of disgusted users carries on the attack, which is not only virtual today. Individual conversation in these circumstances is not possible: you're not talking to individuals, but to a Mob, an animal with it's own behavior and very limited reasoning abilities.
The communication with bots and computer systems that are designed to interact with humans and equipped with the so-called "AI" is of similar nature: it seems there is some exchange, but it's very shallow and limited by the abilities of the receiving end - you can never transmit anything new, anything that the system is unable to understand. Continued use of such systems might have hard to predict consequences.
I'm not sure how true your observation really is, but I sympathize with the sentiment. My personal fear is a future where the only freedoms left are to work and consume.
