Meme creep: redefining "wiretap"

Man charged after videotaping police:

NASHUA [, New Hampshire] – A city man is charged with violating state wiretap laws by recording a detective on his home security camera, while the detective was investigating the man’s sons.

Michael Gannon, 49, of 26 Morgan St., was arrested Tuesday night, after he brought a video to the police station to try to file a complaint against Detective Andrew Karlis, according to Gannon’s wife, Janet Gannon, and police reports filed in Nashua District Court.

Police instead arrested Gannon, charging him with two felony counts of violating state eavesdropping and wiretap law by using an electronic device to record Karlis without the detective’s consent.

Memetic analysis of Apocalypse

Following up on the apocalypse meme, I decided to use some of the tools I've developed over the past week to conduct a "memetic analysis" of Apocalypse, at least from the English Wikipedia perspective.

Starting at the Wikipedia entries for Apocalypse and Eschatology, I crawled down two levels on each Wikipedia link in the two base pages. The result was a network of 21,831 nodes and 51738 edges, impossible to analyze on my home computer. I culled the nodes that did not link back to any other node in the network, resulting in a smaller network with 266 nodes and 4406 edges: easy to analyze but hard to visualize. Therefore, I conducted a betweenness analysis for the smaller network, resulting in a number between 0 and 1 for each node, representing the extent to which the node serves as a "bridge" for a large number of paths between other nodes (1 being the most "between" and 0 being the least). Finally, used this betweenness measure to filter out the least important nodes in the network, varying a threshold until I obtained a visually digestible network image. Here is the result for a threshold of 0.01:

What emerges is that Apocalypse, at least as understood by English-speaking Wikipedia contributors, is overwhelmingly a Western concept, with Christianity, Jesus, Satan, God, etc. in the center of the network. There are a few nodes from Eastern religions on the outer edges of the network, notably Maitreya and Kali Yuga. Oddly, Maya civilization is included in the network, even though the Wikipedia entry does not seem to mention the associated 2012 eschatological speculations. The following figure shows the result of a higher threshold of 0.05, where it is clear that Jesus, God, Satan, and the Bible sit squarely in the middle of the network. So far, nothing too surprising.

Next, I added a Wikipedia page Peak oil, once again traveling down two levels on each link. The result was a network of 74,726 nodes and 30,714 edges. Using the same strategies to cull the data to obtain a visually digestible network image, here is the result:

Clearly Apocalypse and Peak oil separate into largely distinct clusters. What is interesting is what lies in the middle: United States, Sun, Canada, Israel, and Venezuela (and to some extent Doomsday). Note that Pope Benedict XVI now emerges as a bridging node. Readers familiar with Christian apocalyptic thinking will no doubt recognize Israel as a key player (and perhaps Benedict also). Note that Transhumanism and Technological singularity are also in the center.

Finally, I included Global warming, using the same methodology as described above. The result:

With the addition, the clusters seem to merge a bit, with Global warming and Peak oil on one side, Christian apocalyptic thinking on the other, and numerous countries sitting in the middle of the network. Note that George W. Bush and Pope Benedict XVI appear to be the only living persons sitting in the middle of the network.

The results of this analysis highlight which countries and present day personalities are central to the joint themes of Apocalypse, Peak oil, and Global warming. Predictable players emerge as nodes in the network, including one (Maya civilization) that seems to have no explicit mention of apocalypse eschatology in the main page. The results also shows how some of the other millenialist themes of Transhumanism and the Technological singularity travel along as companion memes.

Apocalyptic Thinking

My post at Round Earth League, Sustainability vs. Apocalypse, generated a little discussion between Wally and myself. He reacted rather negatively to a quotation by Ran Prieur, who can admittedly be heavy-handed and difficult to accept out of context. There is this idea in some corners of the internet that we are on the verge of an energy apocalypse (i.e. the whole peak oil / global warming thing), and Ran sees this somewhat as an opportunity to shed some collective baggage, i.e. the power asymmetries that have emerged and intensified with fossil fuels and the technologies they enable. I quoted Ran in my post a couple of weeks ago, South Central Farm, where he rather succinctly lays out the power dynamic that predestined the outcome there. While I don't necessarily agree with Ran on the likely long-term outcomes (or even necessarily the desired outcomes), I think he's pretty good at describing our present situation.

The fact is that there are very powerful and pernicious forces that would make people utterly dependent upon them, and have the firepower to enforce their desires. When food becomes a serious issue because of (1) global climate change and (2) the lack of petroleum for fertilizers, this will come to a head. Tonight I read a story posted via Heretic Fig that serves as an example:

New Delhi, May 8 - The Uttar Pradesh government was conducting raids on farmers for stocking up their own wheat produce, environmental activist Vandana Shiva and Bharat Krishak Samaj executive director Krishan Bir Chowdhary alleged Monday.

They assailed the double standards of the authorities for taking no action against multinational and private companies like Cargil, ITC and PepsiCo for buying wheat in large quantities even as the government was seeking to import 3.5 million tonnes of wheat to meet its buffer stock norms and public distribution system supplies.

While the government seemed reluctant to buy wheat stock from farmers at prices higher than Rs.650 per quintal, it was proposing to import stock at prices over Rs.950 per quintal.

Ran's position, not necessarily mine, is that things will take care of themselves in the very long run: lack of fossil fuels means that eventually all the terrible firepower will go away, or at least the transportation capabilities that makes it easy to deploy over a large geographical range. I don't think that's necessarily the case, since there is always nuclear power available to people who know how to use it and have the will to do so.

My personal belief is that it is important to develop sustainable technologies and also a sustainable food supply. It's also important to consider architectural changes, i.e. construct communities that are close to food supplies and do not require automobiles for daily life. That stuff is a no-brainer: we have to do it.

The real difficulty is how to deal with the political problem of power. As Wally suggests in our discussion, power and its enforcing structures are here to stay, and any disruptions would make things much worse in the short run (meaning our lifetimes). Katrina is a perfect example of this.

My only solution, at the moment, is to try to make people at least aware of the problem. If enough people have their antennae up about it, cultural solutions may emerge.

A separate issue is why people gravitate towards apocalyptic thinking. Apocalyptic scenarios are ultimately unproductive: you can never prepare for an apocalypse and expecting one only saps your productive energy. But I understand why some people gravitate towards this meme, and while I despise the violent apocalyptic frames of Christianity, I have sympathy for the people who are looking to them as a release from the pain of living in a world that is becoming increasingly difficult to negotiate. I think many (if not most?) people intuit the power asymmetry I'm talking about, sense that something is about to change, and fear the ramifications. Apocalyptic Christianity (or apocalyptic environmentalism) is a cognitive strategy some people use to grapple with it.

When looking to the future, we need to consider the meaning of this.

WikiMemes!

I've been playing around with network algorithms, trying to find a way to use them to illuminate memetic research. I've discovered that Wikipedia is a great resource for this kind of "computational memetics". Wikipedia does have its flaws, but it is a continuously updated network of concepts with a regular data format that can easily and quickly be accessed and processed.

It's remarkably simple: you pick a topic (or several) and find the corresponding Wikipedia entries. Then you crawl down the links a predeterimed number of levels, record the linkages, and finally visualize them. In order to do this efficiently there are some technical computer-science issues to deal with, but conceptually that's all there is to it.

My most recent posts addressed (1) organic certification and (2) treason and journalism. The following pictures show you the Wikipedia neighborhood of these two concepts.


For the network that visualizes organic certification, the base-level keywords were Organic_certification, Organic_food, and Sustainable_agriculture. The network shows a cluster involving business and legal issues and another involving organic farming methods. For the network that visualizes treason and journalism, I used both words as base-level keywords. Words like terrorism and sedition appear in the center of the network.

I've also shown a network for Panopticon, which comes up with 1984, Big Brother, and surveillance.

It will be interesting to see how far I can push this. In particular, I'd like to come up with a useful ways to uncover "hidden" memes and track meme-creep.

Meme creep: redefining "organic"

Apparently there is a growing trend to label as "oranic" milk from cows that live in feedlots but are fed organic grain:

A different kind of organic dairy farm is emerging out west _ corporate-owned feedlot operations with thousands of cows that are fed organic grain but, according to critics, get little chance to graze.

Fears that big operations will muscle out family farms have produced a backlash, including a boycott by the Organic Consumers Association against the country's biggest organic milk brand, Horizon Organic.

Organic farmers and consumer groups are hoping the U.S. Department of Agriculture will level the field. The agency is considering whether to mandate that milk bearing the "USDA Organic" seal come from cows that have significant access to pasture, a move smaller producers say would give them the protection they need.

I suppose organic grain is an improvement over the standard industrial practices. But feedlots clearly violate the spirit of "organic". (For an entertaining lesson on industrial beef, see the McDonalds game.)

[Via Cryptogon]

Two tales of memetic pathology

I have two stories that are essentially unrelated except that they came to my attention today:

The first story is that a Hardball guest says the NYT editor is guilty of treason. From ThinkProgress:

The White House has launched an assault on the New York Times for publishing a story about the administration’s secret program to monitor bank records. Yesterday, President Bush said the paper’s conduct was “disgraceful” and White House Press Secretary Tony Snow implied they were undermining Americans’ “right to live.”

The right-wing echo chamber is taking the argument a step further. Appearing on MSNBC’s Hardball, talk show host Melanie Morgan said that New York Times editor Bill Keller is guilty of treason and that “Keller and his associates” should be thrown “in prison for 20 years. Watch it.

[Via Atrios, who argues that this is the consequence of years of failure to stand up to GOP encroachments on journalism.]

In other news, Media Matters reports how Newsday's James Pinkerton says that the media frame Iraq coverage by portraying the U.S. military as "evil", "bad people", and "killers". Arguing that proper coverage would factor in the harsh realities of war, Pinkerton says:

[T]he correct frame, I believe, [...] it’s a minority view, but it’s correct, is [exemplified by a] fellow named Gary Brecher, who writes a [...] column called “War Nerd” for a Russian magazine online. And he makes the point, “Look, this is a war. What do you expect? This is not a police action, this is not a humanitarian mission. This is a war, and you’re going to get Hadithas.”

Unfortunately, as Sadly No! points out, War Nerd is a parody. Another passage from War Nerd states the following:

I’m a war nerd. A backseat sergeant. I know what I am. All I have to do is look down at the keyboard and there’s my hairy white gut slopping over it, and there’s crumbs between the keys from the fake homemade soft’n'chewy big cookies in the vending machine downstairs.

So why am I calling attention to this? The reason is that I think these are two distinct symptoms of serious late-stage memetic pathology settling into our collective psyche. On the one hand, it is now a matter of serious debate to discuss whether a story on the invasion of privacy and related abuses by our elected government constitutes treason, and on the other, there are people who are seriously advocating positions that are so extreme that they exceed the realm of parody.

We're circling the drain, folks.

Joint social networks of media and defense

Following up my post on media giants and their relationships via interlocking directorates, in this post I'll look at the connections between media giants and major defense contractors. I was surpised to find that there are few (if any) direct connections. The major defense contractors most connected to media giants seem to be Honeywell and Northrop Grumman. Honeywell has a 2nd degree connection to CBS via Merril Lynch, a 2nd degree connection to Disney via Edison International, and a 2nd degree connection to GE via Verizon. Northrop Grumman is connected to GE via Deere and Chevron, to Disney via Washington Mutual, and to CBS via Merrill Lynch.


Haliburton and Raytheon are connected to Time via Citigroup. Lockheed is connected to News Corp via Ford Motor, and to Time via Dell. (Note that News corp is relatively isolated from the other media giants.)


At this point, I think it would be more enlightening to focus on individual directors and their biographies, to see if there is anything there. Let me know if you have any ideas.

Enforcing the boundary: illegal memes

GOP Congressman Calls for Criminal Charges Against New York Times:

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee urged the Bush administration Sunday to seek criminal charges against The New York Times for reporting on a secret financial-monitoring program used to trace terrorists.

Rep. Peter King blasted the newspaper's decision last week to report that the Treasury Department was working with the CIA to examine messages within a massive international database of money-transfer records.

"I am asking the Attorney General to begin an investigation and prosecution of The New York Times -- the reporters, the editors and the publisher," said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. "We're at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous."

[via Americablog]

NetVocates

Speaking of PR, which is an important tooll in memetic engineering and a key weapon in memetic warfare, there is apparently a company called NetVocates which is a PR firm focused on blogging. Steve Lagavulin summarizes Robin Hamman at Cybersoc.com:

I won't steal all of Robin's thunder, and you should definitely take a peek over at his weblog for a better take on what his research dug up. But the gist of it is that NetVocates appears to offer a service whereby they will target weblogs which might "impact an organization and its products and image in uncontrolled and often unexpected ways", and they then hire individuals to post comments on those weblogs which will, presumably, help to create more "controlled" and "expected" impacts.

Chip Griffin, founder of NetVocates, offers his side of the story:

NetVocates was founded earlier this year to provide online analysis and advocacy services to clients. What does this mean? NetVocates gathers data about blog posts of interest to its clients, uses proprietary software to blend multiple data sources and electronically sort the information. We then have a staff of experts who review the information to provide reports to clients outlining trends in the blogosphere of interest to our clients.

... For some – but not all – clients, NetVocates works to develop advocacy programs. These programs can take many different forms – steps the client might take to communicate more proactively through its own blog, to work with bloggers to provide information on products and issues, or to address misinformation published in blogs.

Steve has a followup article on the issue. He call attention to the silver lining:

But as a counter-point, let's look at the bright side of NetVocates as well: they pay people to surf the web! Does that sound like your idea of a dream job?

McDonalds -- the videogame

This is hilarious. Like Steve Lagavulin who found it, I did not play the game but I also found the tutorial very educational. Some examples of the information you will need to play this on-line sim-City-esque videogame: on managing your "Agricultural sector":

If we had to rear all the cattle we need in our part of the world, our cities would drown in an ocean of cow shit. Pastures and soy culture need a lot of land and South America is one of the best places for it. Obviously you have to conquer your land as our forefathers did. Remember the old saying: "under every forest there is a lawn".

On managing your brand, one of your weapons is the PR office:

The public relations office develops countermeasures against our detractors (environmentalists, consumer associations and other bands of radicals).

While we're on the subject of resource consumption, check out MyFootprint.com! [Via C. Carico at Expanding Universe].

Fear meme watch: Sears Tower

The Independent reports on the underwhelming truth behind the Sears Tower Plot: Tall stories: The plot to topple Chicago's Sears Tower was not all that it seemed.

The alarming news flashed across America's TV screens on Thursday evening: government agents had thwarted an al-Qa'ida plot, using home-grown American terrorists, to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago in a ghastly repeat of 9/11.

When the dust had settled barely 24 hours later, a rather more modest version of events had emerged. The seven young black men arrested at a warehouse in Miami and Atlanta had never been in touch with al-Qa'ida, and had no explosives. Their "plan" to destroy America's tallest building was little more than wishful thinking, expressed by one of them to an FBI informant purporting to be a member of Osama bin Laden's terrorist organisation.

[...]

That did not deter the US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, from summoning a press conference in which he denounced an attempt to "wage war against America". But the threat, even he admitted, was not immediate - and those who posed it were in fact merely a few semi-unemployed men, most of them petty criminals, from Liberty City, a poor black neighbourhood close to the centre of Miami.

If the case has any significance in America's "war on terror", it is not as a present danger, but as a harbinger of possible future risks.

[Via Americablog]

The social lives of media giants

Following up from my last post about social networks and interlocking directorates of corporations, I now have the top 300 companies in my database (minus 15 companies that are not publicly traded and plus 17 other companies of interest, for a total of 302 companies). The top five "bridging" companies are Citigroup, Pepsico, AMR (American Airlines), Target, and GE, with betweenness measures of 2582, 2151, 1540, 1390, and 1349, respectively.

This post illustrates the social neighborhoods of media giants, defined (as previously) by interlocking directorates.

The first graph shows the social neighborhood of NewsCorp (Rupert Murdoch's spawn), taken out to two degrees of separation from NewsCorp. Note the direct connections to Ford and Amex.

The next graph shows the 2-degree social neighborhood of Disney.


This one shows CBS.



General Electric and TimeWarner have complicated 2-degree neighborhoods, so I'm only showing 1 degree for each. In particular, TimeWarner is connected to CitiGroup, which is hugely connected.


Finally, here's Viacom, the apparently shy media giant (although note the connection to CBS).

The betweenness measures of these companies are 1349 (GE), 580 (Disney), 359 (TimeWarner), 321 (CBS), 122 (Viacom), and 27 (News Corp).

What should we learn from this? Well, it doesn't seem like there's any overall general pattern in terms of cross-memberships on boards, other than that a couple media giants are well-connected. However, I think these figures are a useful reference for suggesting how a particular media message may be slanted. For example, we might be alert to the subtexts of media products produced by NBC, Universal Pictures, Universal Studios, Focus Features, Rogue Pictures, MSNBC.com, msn,com, and NBC.com, all subsidiaries of GE.

This has been an interesting exercise, and I hope to conduct similar analyses of defense contractors, energy companies, pharmaceutical companies, and food companies.

Social networks of corporate citizens

The name of this blog, Memetix, reflects my interest in the propagation of memes¹. A related idea is that of social networks, about which much theoretical material has been written. Memes propagate from node to node (person to person) along the “edges” (technical term for links between people) of the network, and spread faster if they hit a node which is “central” in some sense.

As you can imagine, sociologists are quite interested in social networks. However, the study of social networks is also a big deal in business circles. A recent Wharton Business School article describes how and why companies are becoming interested in studying social networks:

Mapping social networks can be useful in many ways, but [Wharton management professor] Rosenkopf says there are at least two reasons why corporate interest in the subject is growing: Companies want to be able to identify key performers and get a better understanding of the nature of the interaction among employees.

"Hopefully, you have organized your company the best way to get the job done," she says. "But mapping out a network will give you a sense of whether actual work flow and communication flow match what you hope to achieve. Maybe there are bottlenecks where one person is managing all interactions. If you expect two groups to work together closely, and you don't see them doing this, you might want to create liaison roles or other relationships to make information flow better. On the other hand, you may see groups talking to each other too much. When managers see network diagrams, they often realize they need to reconfigure their organizational chart."

The internet is a gigantic social network, and has been studied by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, an important mathematician. An MIT researcher, C. Marlow, is interested in studying how news travels through the blogosphere:

We have constructed a system to track memes within the weblog community. As a meme diffuses through social ties, our system documents the time and location for each posting that is observed. Based on these data, webloggers can be categorized by their adoption characteristics, ranging from early- to late-adopters.

Yes, dear friends, you are being studied.

I am starting to learn some of the techniques used by social network theorists. As an example (which has its own semi-enlightening results), in this article I will present a preliminary analysis of the network formed by our “corporate citizens”. As UCSC sociology professor G. William Domhoff states,

Interlocking directorates -- defined as the linkages among corporations created by individuals who sit on two or more corporate boards -- have been a source of research attention since the Progressive Era at the turn of the 20th century, when they were used by famous muckraking journalists, and future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, to claim that a few large commercial and investment banks controlled most major corporations.

Drawing inspiration from the site They Rule, which provides a graphical tool for researching corporate board memberships and interlocking directorates, I consider two corporations to be linked if they share a board member (or if an officer in one company sits on the board of another). Unfortunately, the data at They Rule is from 2004 and not available in a format necessary for social network analysis. Consequently, I spent the day downloading board information from Reuters. The data used for this analysis consists of the top 100 companies (in gross revenue), minus six companies for which data were difficult to obtain and including an additional 27 companies that are involved in defense, media, or pharmaceuticals. Clearly the 27 extra companies reflect the bias of my own personal interests. Eventually I plan to expand the analysis.

A few screen shots of the network (excluding isolated companies) appear above. Table 1 below shows the non-isolated companies, sorted by centrality degree (number of ties to other companies) and showing betweenness (how much of a bridge the company is) and closeness (how close the company is to others in the network). Unsurprisingly, Citigroup is a huge bridge and very linked, while General Electric, Verizon, and Honeywell are well-linked and represent bridges in the network. Oddly, Pepsico and Target are at the top of the table as well.

A statistical test for betweenness produces a significant P-value (~0.01), demonstrating that this network is more centralized by betweenness than the typical random network of the same size and density, i.e. there are a few key corporations. The corresponding test for degree centrality not significant (with respect to network size, P~0.6), indicating that this network is typical in terms of linkage when compared with other networks of its size.

Thus, it would appear that this social network of corporate citizens seems to have a very large conduit of corporate governance memes in the form of Citibank and perhaps few other companies. It is interesting to compare the results to Domhoff's article, where he uses Citibank as an example, and to the statistics mentioned in this 2002 USA Today article.

This is a work in progress. Please let me know if you have comments, any interesting ideas (or you would like to help download Reuters data!!)

¹Thought of more informally than in the most technical academic sense.

Table 1: Social Network Measures for Individual Companies

	Centrality	Between	Close		Centrality	Between	Close
Company	Degree	ness	ness	Company	Degree	ness	ness
Citigroup	34	1089	0.42	Dow Chemical	8	182	0.34
General Electric	20	455	0.38	Edison International	8	102	0.32
Pepsico	20	435	0.38	General Motors	8	52	0.33
Verizon	20	471	0.37	Hewlett Packard	8	74	0.31
Honeywell	18	337	0.35	Lockheed Martin	8	126	0.30
Target	18	400	0.38	New York Times	8	48	0.32
Du Pont	16	169	0.35	Northrop Grumman	8	65	0.30
Pfizer	16	123	0.34	Sears	8	112	0.31
Procter & Gamble	16	262	0.37	United Parcel	8	109	0.32
Walt Disney	16	322	0.33	Wachovia	8	123	0.32
Boeing	14	191	0.34	Yahoo	8	108	0.31
Chubb	14	261	0.34	ADP	6	58	0.33
Coca Cola	14	159	0.35	AIG	6	38	0.28
ConocoPhillips	14	183	0.36	Albertson's	6	27	0.27
Dell	14	166	0.34	CVS	6	129	0.25
Exxon	14	137	0.34	Federated Dept	6	102	0.28
Ford Motor	14	296	0.35	Google	6	114	0.27
Goldman Sachs	14	130	0.34	International Paper	6	22	0.31
IBM	14	236	0.35	Kroger	6	39	0.30
United Technologies	14	262	0.36	Lowe's	6	131	0.31
American Express	12	187	0.34	Merck	6	19	0.31
Bristol Myers Squibb	12	189	0.37	News Corp	6	5	0.30
Deere	12	135	0.35	TimeWarner	6	46	0.33
Dow Jones	12	111	0.34	United Health	6	21	0.31
FedEx	12	123	0.33	Viacom	6	38	0.28
Home Depot	12	241	0.34	Wellpoint	6	61	0.27
Merrill Lynch	12	147	0.32	WeyerHaeuser	6	29	0.28
Metlife	12	123	0.31	Wyeth	6	5	0.31
Motorola	12	127	0.36	Borders	4	15	0.26
Sprint Nextel	12	68	0.32	Calpine	4	0	0.30
Walmart	12	138	0.34	Costco	4	5	0.26
Wells Fargo	12	241	0.35	HCA	4	0	0.31
Abbott Labs	10	87	0.35	Ingram Micro	4	19	0.27
Alcoa	10	64	0.34	Lehman Brothers	4	8	0.30
Allstate	10	92	0.32	McKesson	4	29	0.28
AT&T	10	87	0.30	Raytheon	4	14	0.31
Bank of America	10	192	0.28	St. Paul Travelers	4	0	0.28
Cardinal Health	10	114	0.32	Sysco	4	0	0.23
CBS Corp	10	166	0.30	Washington Mutual	4	19	0.27
Chevron	10	152	0.32	Aetna	2	0	0.25
Cisco	10	210	0.34	Altria Group	2	0	0.26
Haliburton	10	84	0.35	Amazon.com	2	0	0.21
Intel	10	130	0.31	Barnes & Noble	2	0	0.24
Johnson & Johnson	10	117	0.34	Coca-Cola Bottling	2	0	0.24
Marathon Oil	10	99	0.34	Comcast	2	0	0.30
Microsoft	10	92	0.34	General Dynamics	2	0	0.24
Prudential Financial	10	70	0.33	Genzyme	2	0	0.27
Berkshire Hathaway	8	77	0.30	Hartford Financial	2	0	0.27
Caterpillar	8	18	0.30	Monsanto	2	0	0.23
Choicepoint	8	139	0.29	Safeway	2	0	0.22
Coca-Cola Enterprises	8	25	0.32	Sunoco	2	0	0.20
Consolidated Edison	8	199	0.32	Walgreen	2	0	0.26