I really liked Nadia Asparouhova’s book Antimemetics, exploring the memetic landscape we inhabit (and create!).
Everybody is now familiar with memes, those pieces of content that go “viral” and “infect” the mass consciousness by spreading rapidly across social media. These memes tend to appeal to the lowest common denominator, being light or fun or cute in a way that appeals to everyone so as to increase transmissibility.
But what about ideas that resist transmission and are harder to share? This might be because they are complex or because they challenge social norms in ways that may lead to getting canceled or otherwise shadow banned. Asparouhova describes these ideas as antimemes, high-impact ideas that are difficult to transmit for some reason.
She explores how the digital landscape is changing to accommodate both memes (in shallow public media like Facebook and Twitter) and antimemes (which people engage with in group chats or other private groups), which may have led to the rise of “supermemes” that spread quickly and feel “highly consequential”, “crowding out our ability to think about anything else”.
In this fragmented landscape, we each have a responsibility to manage our own attention, to decide which ideas are worth spreading, because those ideas not only shape our personal realities, but the collective behavior of those around us. In other words, you have a choice: What ideas will you propagate? What ideas will you champion and instantiate? By bringing that choice to our attention, Asparouhova offers hope that each of us can create the future we want for our communities.
I wrote up a longer summary of the book on the blog if you want to learn more: https://lnkd.in/ggFvSmGz