Is video game violence memetic?

[cptbutton]

Digressing, but would memetics include all of the supposed effects like:

Video games make you violent.

Supermodel ads make you anorexic or a fat-shaming sexist pig.

Comic books make you a juvenile delinquent.

Media about good magic users make you satanic.

Having kids make a loyalty oath every morning will make them good citizens.

Rock and Roll music will encourage premarital sex.

etc?

(spun off from Dual inheritance theory and space colonization thread)

[Phil Masters]

What do you mean, "Would it include?"

I'm sure that memeticists would study those media as memetic transmission vectors; the way that certain memeplexes are expressed in specific behaviours; and the way that certain ideas about specific media and media payloads generating specific behaviours have themselves become quite widespread.

[Flyndaran]

In THS one could design video games that really would increase one's risk of violence. Or ads build around subtly destroying self esteem.

Memetics allows them to influence through carefully designed overt and subliminal messages.
People regularly "inoculate" themselves against ubiquitous memes. Like how violent video games count as background memes that remain relatively uniform in type. But memetically designed ones could get around mental walls like slipping past the immune system.

[sir_pudding]

Memetics includes every aspect of culture. The central premise is that all culture is carried by memes. Everything that can be communicated is composed of memes, just like every living organism is composed of elements that are built from genes. So yes, video games are composed of memes. So is the idea that video games promote violence. So is every other piece of art and critical opinion about art. Rite of Spring was made of memes, as was the idea that listening to it degrades morals and undermines society. As was the animated version in Fantasia, as is the idea that classic Disney cartoons are among the mildest entertainments possible and it is safe to just leave Fantasia's Rite of Spring playing to distract a toddler.

If memes are real, this post is made from them, and by reading it, they are replicating.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

If memes are real, this post is made from them, and by reading it, they are replicating.

I think this reifies memes as discrete, independent entities rather more strongly than necessary. Certainly they can be replicated by reading, but they can just as easily be overlooked or forgotten, failing to be reproduced in the audience's behavior.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

I think this reifies memes as discrete, independent entities rather more strongly than necessary. Certainly they can be replicated by reading, but they can just as easily be overlooked or forgotten, failing to be reproduced in the audience's behavior.

Well, yes, but that's the problem with memetics in general isn't it? Genes don't work like this.

At any rate if you read this post, and if it's made of memes, then the memes are replicating at least once as you think them. Maybe they stop there, but there's at least a single replication, if you read them at all.

I suppose "failing to be reproduced in the audience's behavior" is equivalent to "not expressed as proteins" though. Genes that aren't expressed still replicate.

[Flyndaran]

More like viruses. They may be fully incorporated causing infection, or fully obliterated without anyone noticing.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

More like viruses. They may be fully incorporated causing infection, or fully obliterated without anyone noticing.

So the Laurie Anderson pop music version, not the Richard Dawkins pop science version? :)

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

So the Laurie Anderson pop music version, not the Richard Dawkins pop science version? :)

Well Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, not a parasitologist, right? He would use metaphors he could best explain to the scientifically uneducated populace.

Ear worms are perfect examples. I've had songs I hate stuck in my head. Even songs I'm morally opposed to from the beginning.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

At any rate if you read this post, and if it's made of memes, then the memes are replicating at least once as you think them. Maybe they stop there, but there's at least a single replication, if you read them at all.

I don't see that as correct. Your post may carry some memes within its content but that doesn't mean they are necessarily reconstructed as the post is read. It may depend on other memes that the reader does not have. For example, a reader with crap English as a Second Language Skill could plod their way though your post and perhaps even transmit it to another person by sounding out the unknown words and reading it aloud but without themselves comprehending the content and thus failing to host any meme replication.