In this issue:
Tobacco Advertising Update
Memetics Data
State of the World Forum
Tobacco Advertising Update
The political fight continues over banning tobacco advertising. On September
18, 1998, The Board of Health in King County, Washington -- Seattle and
environs -- voted 10-3 to allow only black and white text on all publicly
visible tobacco advertisements. They completely banned any tobacco
advertising within 1000 feet of a school or playground.
A similar measure in neighboring Pierce County awaits an appeal to the 9th
US Circuit Court of Appeals after being upheld by a federal district judge
last November.
Pleasantly, only one member of the board parroted the inane belief that
tobacco advertising doesn't do much to influence minors to smoke. I guess
she thinks that either minors are less susceptible to advertising than
adults, or that American companies are run by the world's stupidest people
who pour billions and billions annually into a marketing mechanism that
"doesn't do much." THINK!
Advertising is a way for commercial interests to plant their memes in people
with varying degrees of penetration. The techniques used are subtle or
obvious (see Key's book "The Age of Manipulation," available from the
Amazon.com Memetics Bookstore http://www.brodietech.com/rbrodie/books.htm )
but they are effective. Since our economy is based on commerce, we tend to
let businesses use any means they want short of outright fraud to promote
their wares. But government prohibition of meme-spreading of harmful
products is far less intrusive than laws against self-destructive behavior
itself. It deserves to be tried.
The Supreme Court has ruled in the past (44 Liquormart) that for government
to regulate commercial speech, it must prove that such regulation will
achieve the government’s stated purpose. Since it let stand a similar
ordinance in Baltimore last year and recently denied the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) authority to regulate tobacco advertising, the Court
seems happy with this kind of local regulation for now. Meanwhile, for some
anti-tobacco ads and other resources, see http://world.std.com/~batteryb/
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Memetics Data
Here are the number of hits for various words on the World Wide Web as of
9/29/98, courtesy of Infoseek. The previous count, from 7/9/97, is included
as a reference point. Words are sorted by percent increase over last
sampling.
Music, sex, food, and Microsoft lead the list with the highest rates of
growth. Darwin, Dawkins, Brodie, and memetics had dramatically lower rates
of growth than any of the other words.
9/29/98 7/9/97 %increase word last time
8,831,904 1,057,284 735% music 4
3,317,431 429,866 672% sex 1
5,243,883 836,252 527% food 5
3,523,344 585,793 501% Microsoft 2
1,050,497 182,739 475% virus 8
6,315,566 1,118,455 465% love 3
6,826,221 1,215,574 462% opportunity 6
872,819 200,383 336% danger 9
9,577,052 2,596,611 269% science 12
47,284 34,845 35.7% Darwin 7
8,070 6,409 25.9% Dawkins 11
7,739 6,183 25.2% Brodie 10
1,628 1,419 14.7% memetics 13
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State of the World Forum
Once again this year I have been invited to join 500 amazing people in San
Francisco to discuss creating a cool future. You can bet I'll be there
spreading the meme meme to the likes of Jodie Foster, Bianca Jagger, Steven
Covey, and John Naisbitt. And It's going to be great to see my buddy Jean
Houston again, the amazing woman who thinks like Solomon and speaks like
Whittier.
A few spaces are left open for interested members of the general public. For
more information see http://www.worldforum.org
All the best memes,
Richard
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