Mutual Reality
A physical or metaphysical place inhabited by two or more sentient beings who are most likely interacting. Benjamin Britton, an electronic artist and a professor at the University of Cincinnati, literally stumbled upon the expression while repeatedly explaining interactive Internet experiences ranging from avatar chat rooms to collaborative CAD. "I was saying 'multiuser virtual reality' too damn fast," Britton recounts, "and it came out as 'mutual reality.'"
The key to mutual reality, Britton explains, is that "the participants are aware of each other." Depending on whether you're a literalist, a C++ programmer, or a Hollywood media mogul, the expression could describe two friends conversing in a cafe, an intensely immersive MUD, or a state-of-the-art computer-generated world like Britton's current project – a mutual reality Moon landing slated for 1999, the anniversary of Neil Armstrong's historic "small step."
Meme
A unit of cultural transmission (rhymes with "cream"). The archetypal meme "meme" was launched by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 mind grenade The Selfish Gene.
Derived from a Greek root meaning "to imitate," meme describes how ideas mimic the behavior of genes, propagating not from body to body, Dawkins wrote, but "by leaping from brain to brain." Memes range from scientific hypotheses to slang words, TV commercials to conspiracy theories. A fertile meme, Dawkins further explained, parasitizes the brain "in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell." Once you're infected, you tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on, and so on, just like the old Jhirmack shampoo ad (itself a long-living meme).
Apart from its commercial applications, studying these "viruses of the mind" has emerged as a serious academic discipline, spawning evolutionary approaches in fields such as political science and cognitive psychology and heady periodicals like the Journal of Memetics. Still, the most celebrated memetic engineers are usually advertisers. Their job, after all, is to create brand recognition, making meme warfare akin to brain-side product placement. The biggest battleground: television.
"It's not called 'programming' for nothing," says author Douglas Rushkoff, whose 1994 book Media Virus! further popularized the notion of memes. "The hardwiring of human beings together through a global interactive media has led to the mass transmission of memes, which, instead of infecting individuals one by one, attack the entire cultural organism."
This article originally appeared in the February issue of Wired magazine.
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