What is the best way to make a difference in the world?
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I’d like to posit that creating an idea that colonizes our minds—a signpost in the memescape, if you will—is a very high leverage way of making a difference in the world. . .The kind of signposts I’m thinking about are often little more than short phrases—or even single word neologisms—that, due to what ideas they have compressed within them, reorient how you see specific spheres of experience.
These are “catchy” concepts that often combine two or more words in unexpected ways, creating a mental hook for a vague penumbra of facts and experiences. And these signposts evoke a similar sensation to when you learn a new word: once you’ve been exposed to one of these, you see it everywhere. . .
How to begin? Recognize patterns in the world and name them. Smash unexpected terms together and see if they sing. Realize when you are struggling to describe something and spend some time just sitting and figuring out how to compress that description down into a short pithy phrase.
Samuel Arbesman, “Constructing Signposts in the Memescape“
There’s something to this idea, but the change you render could be for good or ill. Shifting the memescape is reckless idea, I think, adding distraction to distraction, piling sound byte upon sound byte, pasting clutter over clutter, and hoping that the new coinage will effect a mystical transformational outcome. Arbesman names “premium mediocre,” “cozy futurism,” “horsehistory,” “intuition pump,” “undiscovered public knowledge,” “Matthew effect,” and several others as examples of signposts we now “see everywhere.”
He must be reading and conversing with people quite different than those in my sphere. I have not encountered a single example he cites.
I’m more an advocate of developing discourses, but, as someone who has been attempting to communicate the Christian tradition to people for years, I know how valuable shorthand can be, as can fresh ways of expressing old ideas in memorable, pithy ways. Preachers are often meme generators. The best build a world around those memes.
