Tuesday, August 16, 2005
New York Times science article about gossip isn't very deep or astute, but it does talk about information flow in informal small group economies, how the best gossip is a scoop where a member of the group is violating a social norm.
The term memetics is nowhere to be found in the article, and no austrian economists are consulted. But the obvious parallel would be with blogs. Blogs are gossip on a larger scale. The best blog posts are when somebody catches the king, or the big company, or the big media, in a lie or some other violation of a social norm.
Maybe this is why the Kennedy story is so interesting. The Kennedys had a public image as saints, when they were sinners. Johnson, on the other hand, cultivated an image as a rouge. He was, secretly, actually a sinner or a saint or both? Still don't have it all sorted out.
The term memetics is nowhere to be found in the article, and no austrian economists are consulted. But the obvious parallel would be with blogs. Blogs are gossip on a larger scale. The best blog posts are when somebody catches the king, or the big company, or the big media, in a lie or some other violation of a social norm.
Maybe this is why the Kennedy story is so interesting. The Kennedys had a public image as saints, when they were sinners. Johnson, on the other hand, cultivated an image as a rouge. He was, secretly, actually a sinner or a saint or both? Still don't have it all sorted out.
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