I was reading through "Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections," by Anthony Appiah and came across a line that provoked my thoughts to go into a very strange direction. He was simply sharing the dictionary definition of culture, which read, "The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions and all other products of human work and thought." Strangely enough, when my eyes scanned the word "transmitted," my mind went to sexually transmitted diseases (STD's). Then, it took another turn and read "socially transmitted" and I thought, socially transmitted diseases.
Taking this novel idea, I looked it up on Google. One of the first results was from the credible, Urban Dictionary. According to them, a socially transmitted disease is "when someone blogs, tweets, status updates something that brings the viewer/reader out in a rash." This is an interesting definition in that I had initially assumed that socially transmitted diseases would permeate through the realm of twitter and hashtags and other media that begin trends.
The search result below read if obesity is a socially transmitted disease. It summarized research performed on whether food choices were made based on social norms. Their findings were that people did make food choices based on what others chose around them. The article can be found here: http://www.ideafit.com/fitness-library/is-obesity-a-socially-transmitted-disease-0.
Another result displayed a forum page for I Love Philosophy. The person beginning the forum was interested in socially transmitted diseases. He described STD's as being transmitted through memetic means, which is a terms used to describe evolutionary models for culture information transfer. The term memetic originated from Richard Dawkin's book, "The Selfish Gene." The person in the forum also suggested that STD's could be spread both through a combination of memetic and genetic means. The forum page can be found here: http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=180948.
I've decided to make up my own socially transmitted diseases here:
- Hashtagoreia - #Excessive hashtags
- Facebook Fever - Post, Like, Creep and Repeat.
- Selfylis (In case you didn't get this one, it has to do with selfies)
- Hipsteritis B and Hipsteritis C - We refuse to conform to social standards, so we conformed to our own social standards.
So remember, if you are going to go social, use protection!
Love the new diseases. There are so many possibilities for socially (and technologically) transmitted maladies. I'll be thinking of some in my spare time.
ReplyDeleteSome, like Dawkins, argue that memes develop and grow based on ability to thrive in a given context and so are constantly in a struggle for survival of the fittest. So memes either catch on and become long lasting or become extinct. They are much like viruses. If this is so, which of the large categories we are considering this semester seem to qualify as memes and which seem to fit in some other . . . category? We'll look at a few tomorrow in class . . .