Friday, September 21, 2018

Weekly content updates starting 9/28. Here is a bit of a preview.

Whew, it has been entirely too long since I updated this website. Personally I think its well past time I changed that state of affairs, as I just hate it when an oddball internet personality abandons an interesting project/stops updating. So I refuse to be the girl that does that.

I haven't updated in a long time for a variety of reasons- but they mostly come down to needing to work on some personal issues before I was prepared to address this kind of material during the Presidency of one Donald J. Trump. And while work on those personal issues continues I feel I am at a point where I can return to this project. More importantly though- I am at a point where this project once again excites me- I am really looking forwards to sharing the neat ideas I have developed over the past year.

During my long hiatus this project was never far from my mind and in the background I have been steadily creating material that I intend to roll out with weekly updates over (at least) the next six months. The scope of my theoretical work has increased tremendously in that time- well beyond just the Narrativist Framework. I now consider Narrativism to be one example of a "Self Replicating Behavior Pattern"; that is to say an identifiable behavior pattern that is transmissible from person to person.

In addition to Narrativists I have created several new frameworks that describe two additional self replicating patterns (Cooperators and Metathinkers), as well as what I consider to be the two archetypes that separate distinct forms of each pattern (Structuralists and Integrators). Underlying all of this is a theory of the subconscious mind that is my current best attempt to explain the existence of Self Replicating Behavior Patterns (HumanOS Framework*)

*Despite the implications of the name the HumanOS Framework is not meant to argue that the human brain is literally a computer, rather it uses concepts from computing as metaphors to explain my theories about the relationship between the conscious and subconscious mind. I have discarded two previous versions of this framework- 1.) an attempt to explain these theories using the bridge of the Starship Enterprise as a basis and 2.) a version of this framework that compared the subconscious mind to a gigantic industrial facility and the conscious mind as an out-of-touch manager that had never "visited the factory floor". For a variety of reasons both of these were discarded in favor of using computer metaphors.

Once I have elaborated on these new Frameworks (as well as doing a general rewrite/improvement on the existing articles for Narrativism) I intend to use these concepts to explore various cultures/subcultures from a novel perspective. For example I consider the Anabaptist subculture (Amish and Mennonites) to be an example of a "Structuralist/Narrativist" culture- one whose 500 year stability gives a hint of both the strength of human unity that can be achieved through a commonly shared story as well as hinting at Narrativism having been at one time in human history a beneficial self replicating pattern. Another example of my future work is a small series of essays laying out the case that the phenomenon of Hikkikomori in Japan is a consequence of a dramatic increase in the Integrator pattern in Japanese society- with a hypothesis that this shift was in large caused by Japanese youth experiencing a dramatic increase in their media consumption in the years since the end of WWII.

The coming updates to this website are not limited solely to my theoretical work- one of the lessons of the past year has been that I need to follow my muse a little more often instead of trying to force myself to write a specific sequence of articles. Towards this end I am working on articles that will dive deeply into a variety of topics that have caught my interest- everything from the (mostly forgotten) history of Slenderman to a deep dive on the underlying psychology being exploited by the operators of the Qanon cult. (And yes, at this point it is a cult.)

So keep an eye on this blog and spread the word. Weekly (perhaps even a little more) updates to this website begin on 9/28.

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