Media Viruses

Twenty-odd years ago, I read Douglas Rushkoff’s, Media Virus: Hidden Agenda in Popular Culture (Ballantine, 1994). In essence, Rushkoff was writing about memes, a term coined in the 70s by Richard Dawkins, though serious study of memes was just beginning in the years Rushkoff was writing. It’s a book that has always stayed with me. At the time, I was given hope by it that we would be able to understand the power of media viruses and perhaps even turn them back on their originators. Things look much darker now that media viruses have come to thrive in a new ecosystems that few of us could have envisioned. Now Rushkoff, together with David Pescovitz, and Jake Dunagan, have produced a remarkable new view of the topic in a short paper, "The Biology Of Disinformation: Memes, Media Viruses, and Cultural Inoculation" (Institute for the Future, 2018, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 INTL).

The biology in the title is both metaphor and reality, but it is probably not meant in the way you are most used to thinking of biology. The authors are thinking in both environmental and phenomenological terms. "So, biology is best understood as systems acting within and in concert with other systems. This is true for brains and mental systems." (p. 24) Nor should we be thinking of these memetic viruses as just content, which is the tendency we have seen in the press; instead, the authors arguer, we must see them as having two parts, "a novel media shell" to carry it and "provocative memetic material" as content. (p. 10) Equally important, they argue that we must look at it very much like a biological virus, meaning that we have to look at its relationship to its environment, its hosts, and other memes. Essentially, they are arguing that we have been looking at parts of the picture, when we need to see the whole. 

The different parts include: (1) the content, which in the recent memetic attacks are not meant to convey a sophisticated meaning, but to act on the emotions and sow distrust and division; (2) novel ways of exploiting different kinds of networked media (not just social media); (3) societal and cultural problems that provide pathways for the virus; (4) the social and networked media themselves, of which there is too little understanding; and (5) human psychology, particularly our cognitive habits. Only by paying attention to all of them can we handle the onslaught.

Perhaps if we had paid more attention to the work of the original cybernetic pioneers, who were not just concerned with engineering and control systems, but all aspects of life and thought in an environment that included machines, we might be better placed to deal with our present situation, but we were lazy and left cybernetics too much to the engineers and scientists without sufficient exploration of its possibilities or its moralities. Rushkoff, Pescovitz, and Dunagan did not suggest that, but I do. Too much of our present troubles are rooted in the failure to understand context, relationships, and feedback in systems. By failing to do so, we have let ourselves open to exploitation through our technologies, have failed to humanize them, and have sacrificed too much of our own humanity. 

I am picking and choosing from the paper, not trying to summarize it, but I will leave you with one specific thought from it, one that we need to take to heart and adopt immediately: "But each extension of our social reality into a new medium requires that we make a conscious effort to bring our humanity along with us." (p. 30)