Slides

3-4 Researching and Presenting

This project addresses topic selection strategies, suggestions for research and methods for producing a well organized speech.

Purpose: The purpose of this project is to learn or review basic research methods and present a well-organized, well-researched speech on any topic.

Overview: Select a topic that you are not already familiar with or that you wish to learn more about. Be sure your topic is narrow enough to be an effective 5- to 7-minute speech. Research the topic and begin organizing the information, as described in this project. Practice your speech and continue to refine its organization. Present your speech at a club meeting.

Competencies:

• Research and present an unfamiliar topic.
• Organize the speech clearly to maximize audience understanding.
• Craft clear and engaging transitions between main sections of your speech.
• Use and cite sources to support speech content and make source list available to audience members.

Speech timings: 5:00, 6:00, 7:00

Script

Memes. You’ve all heard of them. Maybe through your annoying friend that’s sending you so many, you’re wondering if they actually have a job. For example, my favourite is the Bernie Sanders meme, this old white guy standing outside in the rain “asking once again for your campaign donations”. This makes me think of our treasurer reminding me to pay my Toastmasters membership fees every term.

However, there is another meaning of the word meme that most of us are not aware of. It is used in the field of memetics. Memetics is a theory of cultural evolution that was popularised by Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene”. It comes from Ancient Greek, “imitated thing”. A meme is a cultural unit of information: an idea, a behaviour. In biological evolution, genes are replicators, this is the biological information that is copied from one living organism to its offspring, it is being replicated, copied. In societies, memes are the replicators, they are the cultural information that is being copied, replicated, from one person to another.

These memes are analogous to a virus. A virus is “selfish” and attempts to infect and spread its “genes”. Similarly, these memes are trying to spread themselves over a whole society. Just like a virus, these memes are “hosted” in the minds of people and reproduces itself by “infecting” the next person. Let’s take the example of the idea that Biden is a lizard. For those who aren’t aware, there is this conspiracy theory that lizard-people are running the US government. If you haven’t heard about it, you’re probably not spending enough time on Reddit or 4chan. Anyways, you can imagine how this information can spread over a network of individuals through the power of online social networks or, alternatively, your politically incorrect uncle at the bar.

The really fascinating part of this theory of memetics is that these “memes” and their survival, just like genes, are regulated by the rules of Darwinian evolution. In nature, humans with stronger immune systems or lions with sharper claws have a higher likelihood of surviving. This means that, over time, these genes that are beneficial to survival are passed onto the next generations: they replicate. They replicate because they are “beneficial” to the host. Memes are the same: these ideas or behaviours spread and survive because they are “beneficial” to a host or a group of individuals

For example, the idea of Biden being a lizard. It replicates itself not necessarily because it’s true, we don’t really know that for sure. It replicates itself because it serves a purpose to the host. Here, it might be used to discredit Democrats, or, for people that like lizards, they might find that it is a good trait to have in a President, or it might even be used to win an argument against your overly liberal girlfriend. We, as individual agents in a network, are hosts but also diffusers of memes.

As you can see, these memes fulfil the condition for Darwinian evolution: they are copied, they vary over time and they compete for space in our minds, meaning that only the “fittest” or most “beneficial” memes will survive. Then, we can say that thanks to memes, human culture evolves.

The theory of memetics has been heavily criticised and largely discredited because Dawkins and subsequent researchers have had trouble defining exactly what are the mechanisms that enable a meme to replicate. They have not been able to explain how a meme influences a human mind and what makes a meme survive: is it because it will make a person richer, look smarter, feel superior? This is so hard because we still know so little about how our brain functions and processes information.

The main reason memetics is disregarded, though, is because it is extremely hard to quantify, model and test. If we cannot do any of these things, there is no room for scientific inquiry. However, I believe that theorising about a problem on a conceptual level is still incredibly important. It’s not because we can’t scientifically prove something just yet, that we need to disregard and side-line a phenomenon that we can see.

So, why should you care? For most of you, you might be thinking that me telling you this is just like when your mom tells you that the dishwasher needs to be unloaded. You register the information but you don’t really do anything about it, and try to disappear.

Apart from the fact that it is intellectually fascinating, understanding cultural evolution is especially important in the age of social media and rapid communication. How fast ideas can spread, and societies evolve has been supercharged over the past two centuries. Remember how Greeks had to run a whole marathon to announce victory in battle. Now, we are so spoiled with rapid communication that we send each other stupid memes every day.

Information is indeed the currency of humans, not money nor natural resources. Humans are constantly attempting to spread, restrict or modify the flow of information in a quest to influence, control, or protect others. For example, the Chinese firewall censors information on the Chinese internet it deems anti-patriotic, catholic missionaries spread the gospel of god and Toastmasters International sends us monthly newsletters. In addition, grassroot trends and frenzies can spread like wildfire, just like an epidemic, and are so hard to control. This is how thousands of people got rich from buying a Shiba Inu crypto coin, or how the whole of Berlin thought that a Lion was roaming around Tiergarten.

All of this can be explained by how information flows in a society, whether it is true or not. Memetics might offer a theory to better understand how these ideas spread and hence, how culture evolves. So next time you send to your friend a meme about Biden being a lizard, think about what you actually are infecting them with.