Customer Reviews

Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme

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Since its publication in 1996, Richard Brodie's 'Virus of the Mind' has ignited ongoing debate within the memetics community, and signalled the beginning of the new science crossing-the-chasm into the mainstream (for example, Oprah Winfrey invited Brodie on her talk-show in January 1999).

For 'hard' scientific data and mathematical/conceptual modelling (which really conveys why memetics is a legitimate science and not just a controversial upstart), you definately need to look elsewhere (Brodie himself has admitted this to me in extensive interviews). Texts by Lynch, Beck & Cowan, Csikzentmihalyi, Blackmore, Dennett, Dawkins, and Hofstadter are more useful in this regard. Brodie should be considered as a populariser of memetics, able to look at its impact on and relevance to contemporary cultural debates.

Politics aside, Brodie's book is best understood as an accessible introduction to the memetics field, which can capture and hold a general audience's attention. It is closer in many respects to a description of evolutionary psychology drives, 'hot buttons', coercive double-binds, and ideological faith/belief structures used by cults, advertisers, politicians, and religious entities.

Thus, a reading of 'Virus of the Mind' can offer you an accessible text with some insight into how people are programmed, and how to become more aware of your own consensus trance (Charles T. Tart). It continues a self-help perspective developed by Brodie in his earlier book 'Getting Past OK'. Many of Brodie's ideas have been said before in different contexts, but the memetics angle puts a fresh spin on things, and his early chapters on definitions of memes are useful for the layperson in confronting a rapidly growing field.

As long as you don't expect the definitive text on memetics (which Dawkins may one day write as 'The Selfish Meme'?), you will find some useful insights that can be quickly integrated into everyday living. This is the real strength of the book, and partly why it has proven to be so popular.

Richard Brodie's, Virus of the Mind, presents what has proven to me the most practical use of the idea of memes. He presents plenty of good scientific background to set up the concept for those still unfamiliar with the meme meme. Although he does not actually inaugurate a true scientific field of memetics, he uses the concept of memes very skillfully to raise our consciousness and look at everyday things in our culture in a whole new light. In this respect I think he accomplishes far more than many of the unsatisfying attempts to make memetics a full fledged science. It is a bit early to expect such grand successful collective science, but it is not too early to raise our consciousness as individuals about some of these ideas, and Richard Brodie does a fantastic job in that undertaking.

Unlike some in the self-development field, Richard Brodie does not insult the intelligence of more educated readers. He doesn't hide the ball, act mysterious in his presentation, cop out to supernaturalism, or try to claim false or highly questionable scientific support. I have found it easy to disagree with him on some points and still get a lot out of his work. He has certainly given a lot of serious thought to the nuances, pitfalls, and strongpoints of our modern culture and that shows through in this book. He is a guy trying to figure things out just like all of us, and he shares his thoughts in a non-offensive highly accessible way. I think you will find his book a joy to read, and find many useful insights as we individually try to navigate the quickly evolving cultural environment we find ourselves in today.

Please be advised that this book does not take a cold calculated scientific approach at explaining memetics. Richard Brodie explains memes by recounting his personal discovery of memes, futhermore elaborating a fairly modest 'scientific' conclusion. I recommended this book to those merely curious about memetics. If you like 'guru-type' self help books you'll find that this book will suffice is explaining memes while expanding your consciousness. If you are looking for a scientific approach to memetics I would recommend Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine.

Virus of the Mind is nothing short of extraordinary! What you'll learn from Richard Brodie's book is how and why words, concepts, ideas and beliefs are transmitted, become dominant and get woven into the very fabric of our personal lives and our cultures. Indeed, Virus of the Mind is a wonderfully insightful book that should be read by everyone wishing to make better sense of the world around them--not only of global events, but also of their own life patterns. I am the president of a software development company, an attorney, a student of psychology and linguistics for 15 years and the information I learned in this book was truly ground breaking. In my opinion, this is one of the 10 most important books that is available to read today. Get it and read it!

Although I think that the concept of the meme and a science of memetics would be very helpful in understanding culture and how it develops, I'm not certain that all discussions of how memes work in present day society is necessarily new or helpful. Mr. Brodie's book seems to me, therefore, something of a "pop-psychology" book that represents itself as something more than it is.

Psychology as a field has already done and continues to do an adequate job of enlightening us on our behaviors and motivations without any need to refer back to Darwinian theories. Cordelia Fine's book A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives, for instance, discusses many of our subconscious processes, the "whys?" and "whats?" of our various opinions, prejudices, and behaviors, and does so with experimental evidence to support them. Evidence, however, is what is conspicuously absent from Mr. Brodie's book, "Virus of the Mind." Although much of what he tells the reader is undoubtedly true, it is also mostly a rehash of evolutionary theory, and where memes come into play, mostly of the sort of "just so" category of "proof."

I agree with the author that every society is "infected" by its own culture and that different aspects of any given culture can be passed on to "infect" others. Cultural anthropology has collected abundant evidence that mankind is capable of producing almost limitless forms of behavior and material artifacts and of passing these on between generations and neighboring groups. This is anything but new. Frasier's classic book on magic and religion, The Golden Bough, among others, contains vast amounts of information on culture (not all of them reliable facts, however). It proves, if nothing else, that anthropology as a discipline has been and continues to be thoroughly active in its study of what we do, why we do it, what we make and how we use it.

Our fascination with the almost expotential rise in material culture since the first stone tool and with the impact of technology on individuals seems to scream for an explanation. Just the simple fact that it took almost a million years from the invention of a simple shaped cobble tool to create another style of tool and another 800,000 before the next style after that, especially in the presence of the current speed of cultural change, challenges our big brains to come up with an answer to "why?" John Burke's series Connections 1 (5 - Disc Set) makes it abundantly clear as to why. It takes a certain critical mass of ideas before a new one can take shape; in short the birth of a new idea has to actually be possible in context. A Paleolithic hunter-gatherer would hardly have been able to come up with nuclear power as a substitute for environmentally polluting wood campfires! He would, in fact, have been unable to conceptualize the problem of pollution or that his environment might suffer from it, yet alone that the chronic congestion and cough he suffered was proof thereof. (Cockburn's book Mummies, Disease and Ancient Cultures on the health of early people preserved by various means reveals the commonness of lung diseases from this source of pollution). Furthermore, as this series also makes clear, changes in technology proceed in tandem. It requires at least a minimal investment in infrastructure to produce electricity, and that infrastructure has to wait until some degree of precision manufacturing is possible or even understood as necessary. Furthermore society has to be convinced that the new technology is useful. Hero of Alexandria is known to have invented and understood the principles of steam power in the first century AD, but Greco-Roman society functioned on slave labor and saw no reason to do otherwise. It was in fact awash in slave labor because of its successful military exploitation of a fair share of the settled world around it. Water power was not even regularly exploited until the cost of labor--slave or wage--became more dear.

What the author seems to neglect is that a science of memetics isn't about changing what we do, how we do it, or what we make--at least not at the outset--but about understanding how it fits into who we are and how we got that way. If memes like genes have something to say about our evolution and our "fitness" as an organism, just what is it and how does it work biologically? Susan Blackmore's book The Meme Machine (Popular Science) goes a long way in pointing this out, suggesting a definition of meme, suggesting how it might work, and suggesting how this might be tested experimentally. At this point in the incipient science it hardly seems appropriate to begin application of principles we don't even know exist to problems that already have other sciences invested in their research.

I came away feeling that the author's intention was simply to infect me with yet another meme, one that encouraged me to buy the book and absorb the information as factual. In short it's another self help book. Unfortunately like most self help books, it requires the reader to apply its principles to a life in progress, which is not always easily done. Our lives play out in the midst of hundreds of others and are embedded in the culture in which we live them. Changes can sometimes be difficult. Which is why we have so many different self help books out there, and yet we still remain unchanged despite them. I am proof positive; I've read books on how to decrease clutter, reduce my spending, lose weight, gain confidence, stop being anxious, find love, etc. I still live in a messy house, buy way more than I actually need, am unhealthily overweight, lack any more confidence than I ever had, am habitually anxious, and totally loveless--although I'm frequently less happy when I'm in love, so I'm probably ahead of the game in that respect. I wasn't all that successful in changing myself; but the authors of the books were highly successful in getting them sold and me to buy one! Successful memes at work perhaps?

This book is a ground-breaker. Yeah, okay it's written at a fairly simple level, but that's one of the reasons it's so effective! In recent years, a series called [Whatever] For Dummies has become wildly popular (along with another, [Whatever] for the Complete Idiot). Of course, these books are for neither "dummies" nor "idiots", but rather for the common guy/gal, the "average Joe", the lay person who wants to get the gist of a topic, a working knowledge, without having to wade through a bunch of complicated extraneous matter to get to the heart of the subject, and get a grasp of it, a good working knowledge that will be USEFUL. And this is exactly what Richard Brodie has done. _Virus of the Mind_ could be retitled "Memetics for Dummies" and probably sell tons more books (cuz hey, the 'for Dummies' buzzword is a pretty successful meme, eh?). I've read several reviews here where 'intellectuals' were slamming the book, cuz maybe it's "not technically correct" about some aspects (in their opinions) of memetics, or it's "written at a high school level", or it uses "cute cartoons" to get some points across. Hey, that's what makes it accessible to so many more people than some of the "loftier tomes". This book is what will (has?) spread the Memetics mind virus throughout the "masses", like a cold spreading through a crowded room!! Hurrah for Richard Brodie.

"Virus of the Mind" provides a very good introduction into
memetics while trying to be a self-help book. Brodie gives a
nice overview of the concept of memes, where it started, and how
memes exist in current society. He then goes over the
destructive side of memes while keeping the subject light and
somewhat humorous. Brodie's writing style makes the subject easy
to follow and a very quick read. From reading the book, one gets
a quick understanding of how others can use memes to influence
ones behavior, which serves the reader with the ability to look
how things are being presented to them; wether in news,
commercials or relationships.

Brodie used the first half of the book to explain where the
existence of memes came from, and what they represent. The last
half was used to explain how to notice them in daily life. I
would like to have seen more information for the reader on how to
detect memes with concrete examples, though he does give enough
information so the reader can 'learn' this process themselves in
more detail, with abit of work. He provides enough information
for the consumer, but not enough for those trying to reach
consumers, which is interesting.

In short, the book is worth reading for those trying to
understand why they buy so much useless stuff, or wondering why
a song stays stuck in their head. For more specific information
on coercive techniques employeed against individual consumers,
see Douglas Rushkoff's book 'Coercion'

The meme idea is very powerful, and must account for the number of positive reviews this book gets. However, this text is actually one of the worst ways to get an introduction to the meme theory.

What bothered me most is that the author was not direct to the point in telling about the idea, and then developing it from there. Instead, he went around in circles, biting at the edges, and maintaining a constant "wow, geez, look at it" tone that was very easy to get tired of.

Substance, really very little. I suggest try another book (there are few, start with Richard Dawkin's original the Selfish Gene).

I enjoyed the opening of the book. As Brodie's argument progressed, I became much less enamored. Having just finished reading Blackmore's the Meme Machine, I strongly urge anyone interested in memes to pick up that book either as a companion volume or as a substitute. Blackmore's book is terrific and grounded in research while Brodie's book reads more like a self-help book.

For every new concept that enters the popular vocabulary, there are dozens of popular writers waiting to pounce on it and make it their own. Thus we have "quantum jumps" in everything from athletic shoes to television sets, "chaos" from business consultants and self-help gurus and now, The Meme.

It doesn't help that memes are more metaphor than describable object; you won't see many papers being published in rigorous academic journals describing replication and mutation in memes. That makes them all the more the perfect fodder for popular writers who can make "meme" mean anything they care to. What's a meme? Well, what do you want it to be?

The author of this book is a semi-retired programmer whose previous book teaches us all how to be happy with only a good self-image and a few million dollars in the bank. This book combines the author's poor understanding of Dawkins' concept together with a fairly shallow inderstanding of anthropology, psychology and other sciences to deliver...not much.