In Worcester recently I noticed a footbridge with padlocks fixed on the railings. Seemed to me to be a new trend.

It got me thinking – what drives some people to slavishly adhere to seemingly senseless trends? Are they missing something, or do they have something extra that others don’t have? Is it an evolutionary thing? Enquiring mind melt-down!

Evidence: http://10mosttoday.com/10-awesome-love-locks-locations-from-around-the-world/

A loop of tape and assorted playback heads

Because far too many people are sheep….like what you did there piedi!

There are many things my father did that drove me mad and made me determined to do things differently…but he always walked his own path and I will always thank him for that lesson.

Now I think about it…..650B all the way!! 😉

^
😀

Busted! What’s more – that keyring had no earthly use (discounting some woo-woo thumb-rubbing stress relief flim-flam)

8)

(Hang on – was I copying others for buying MBUK or copying others for riding a mountain bike and reading about them? Memory says neither, it went like this:

– Built road bike up from old frame as outgrew my old one at 14 yrs
– Bent road bike frame at head tube not looking and hit back of car
– Got new job and decided time for new bike
– Went into bike shop in 1989 and was sold an ‘ATB’ which fitted my budget and expectations (more powerful brakes, more gears, tough for going offroad, (I typically used my road bike on towpaths)
– Got into upgrading bike (this is thin ice) so bought MBUK to check out available parts
– Received free keyring.
– That’s it, I’m in the club innit? i subscribed to the hive-mind!

In the specific case of annoying romantic gestures like “love locks”:

– this has been a thing in Paris for ages;
– since Instagram, all gestures are public;
– most relationships contain at least one person who isn’t cynical about love;
– the range of romantic gestures capable of being Instagrammed is finite;
– all love locks are Instagrammed; and
– not everyone can wait to go to Paris to Instagram their love lock.

It’s not yet clear whether the ability or willingness to Instagram a love lock is actually an evolutionary adaptation, but it is certainly a meme, knowledge of which aids the sexing. It is therefore as contagious as herpes.

🙂

Hold up…is it copying someone else if you like or know about Mint Sauce????…is it the fact that Mint is a sheep, means that we are all sheep for liking mountain biking….so many questions…..

…shhheeetttt, I just thought it was like a Mason’s handshake…only those in the know….knew about it.

Mr Dawkins would refer to this as a Meme wouldn’t he? An old friend of mine used to say that ‘ideas are in the aether’ – not so much in respect to people copying one another – the love locks being a case of people just repeating something they’ve seen on holiday – but in terms of cultural shifts and fashions and different people arriving at the same ideas at the same time. If people are in the same environment then they’re going to see the same connections and come up with the same ideas.

You can look back at certain eras and see how political or global events shape peoples ideas and creative output even if the people having those ideas weren’t really conscious of those influences – certain film ideas for instance will chime with the audience because of their wider concerns outside the cinema.

Similarly its said that every music has its drug, although its fairer to say that every drug has its music, in that people who are fans of a certain drug will choose music that complements it. The drug itself isn’t the source of any creativity and you don’t need to take the drug to enjoy the music but the musician taking the same drug as the audience means they’re aware of the aesthetics that audience enjoys.

Mr Dawkins would refer to this as a Meme wouldn’t he?

When I was a kid we’d say ‘trend’, ie that’s ‘trendy’ or ‘following a trend’. Isn’t ‘meme’ simply the new ‘trend’? A trend in Emperor’s clothing?

An old friend of mine used to say that ‘ideas are in the aether’ – not so much in respect to people copying one another

An old school-friend of mine used to say ‘Check out my snorkel!’. He also laughed at my coat (Dad got my unbranded Daktari-styled coats from a bloke he worked with at Leyland) and I think the scorn and sneering set an anti-trend thing up in my head.

Consequently as an adult I’m much more sensitive to being accused of following a trend than I am for being sneered at for having an un-trendy bike/shoe/jacket/pursuit. Brains are funny places…

Language too?

For example – it’s internet-trendy nowadays to describe something trendy as ‘a thing’, for instance the following sentence arguably makes sense today:

‘Thing is – is saying ‘is this a thing?’ still a thing?’

I doubt such a question phrased in such a way would have made sense twenty years ago? I get the feeling it’s trendier still to say such things as ‘is this still a thing?’ with an air of irony, or post-ironic irony, or something like that?

I think it’s that people like things they like, and they like doing things they like doing

the internet allows us to show other people things we think they might like and in turn see something that we think we should do just because someone else had done it before.!

We arent original, just parasites feeding off other peoples ideas. Bah I’m going around in loops.

Yes, we’re all individuals.

We arent original, just parasites feeding off other peoples ideas.

[video]http://youtu.be/jVygqjyS4CA[/video]

BTW it’s an essential part of being a social animal. If you can’t master the art of copying then neither will you’re DNA.

Jumping on the bandwagon, innit? Fitting in with the rest of your peers?

Funny how having your own ideas & perhaps being a bit quirky or out there is often seen as something to point & laugh at, whereas the ‘cool’ ones follow the trends and do everything that everyone else does.

On a recent holiday in Tenerife, it amazed me the amount of blokes who were clearly following the latest ‘towie’ look and all had the same hair style, sunglasses, shorts, shoes. They just looked like clones of each other.
But then, I’ve never understood fashion trends – people choosing to wear stuff because other people tell them that this year it’s cool, whereas last year they wouldn’t have worn it because it wasn’t ‘in fashion’.
The current beard thing being a more extreme example of this; blokes who would never normally consider a beard, growing one because it’s currently fashionable & then as soon as they are unfashionable again they’ll be shaved off……..weird!

The Wildhearts had a t-shirt with ‘demand the right to be unique’ on the back – it was always amusing turning up to The Astoria to see them play & looking at the sea of people wearing ‘demand the right to be unique’ on their t-shirts. I assumed that was why the Wildhearts came up with the idea in the first place.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxOScWMZdwI[/video]

I’m not

The bit about the Love Locks trend that I like best is that it seems to have spread from the Pont des Arts, to bridges generally, to scenic railings, to any old railings. There are love locks attached to the gate to get to our work car park and to the basement window grilles of the pub over the road. Romance at its finest!

Malvern Rider – Member

When I was a kid we’d say ‘trend’, ie that’s ‘trendy’ or ‘following a trend’. Isn’t ‘meme’ simply the new ‘trend’? A trend in Emperor’s clothing?

didn’t Dawkins coin the word ‘meme’ when he was trying to explain how ideas can behave* like genes? – and so help us better understand genes?

(*y’know, survive, mutate, die, etc.)

A loop of tape and assorted playback heads

Just wanted to let you know this wasn’t completely wasted 🙂

If we didn’t copy other people’s ideas and improve/adapt them in some small way we’d still be living in caves, wearing bearskin and communicating in grunts.

This evolution happens at cell level, it’s built into nature at every level, human social behaviour is just a refined and highly visible example