Hi Rob,

Quote Originally Posted by Rob Thornton View Post
Is Marc T around - I hate to always reach for Marc to provide us info on social sciences, but we're still looking for some other scientists to fill the roles of us knuckle draggers and Serpicos
Just trying to take off most of the Canada Day weekend (lots of strawberry daiquiris yesterday ).

I've used various forms of social contagion theories (note the plural). One of the earliest I found was by psychologist Mark Baldwin from the 1890's, although there are inferences towards this type of theory in the works of Quetelet and Babbage from the 1830's. Modern versions include the one you referred to, as well as some interesting stuff in criminology (cf Mark Hamm on skinhead gangs - the reference eludes me, we were drinking too much beer at the time), some of the work of Dawkins on mind viruses, and, of course, Barry Wellman's stuff along with his circle.

On the whole, I have found that the general "shape" (?) of the theories are rather poorly defined - they rely either on structures (e.g. social network analysis) or on content (e.g. mind viruses). Few of them seem to try and integrate the two, although Piere Bourdieu's work tries in some ways. BTW, Dominique is scathingly accurate in how Bourdieu can rot the mind - although a good solid reading of Malinowski acts as an antidote (cf. Argnaughts of the Western Pacific). Bourdieu "borrowed" many of his ideas from Malinowski .

To my mind, the major problem with social contagion theory is that it is at a very early stage of its development - sort of the "humours" stage of medicine. We don't really have the technology to perceive most of the content beyond inference, and our understandings of the structures involved are, really, quite minimal. Sure, we know a lot about social networks and kinship networks, but how about the mechanism of transmission between people of an "idea" or "perception"? When it's a highly stylized and formalized transmission, sure, we know some of the mechanisms - this is, after all, what ritual is all about. Even there, and it's the one I know best, we are still working off of incomplete observational data. For example, to really understand the process, we would need to be able to actually monitor neuronal change (along with neurotransmitter changes) in real time without interfering with the actual operation.

Rob, remember a while ago when I was arguing that the real CoG of AQ was the technological ability to transform the Love of God into hatred of the West? This is the sort of thing I was trying to get at - a technology for transforming the content perceptions of individuals and then transmitting them to the "open ideas"marketplace.

Marc