Search results for "Memetics"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
The metaphorical species: Evolution, adaptation and speciation of metaphors
2015
Studying cartoons about the economic crisis and focusing on a pair of scissors as a symbol, I prove how they first turn into unambiguous metaphor for the economic crisis and then experience an evolution in order to adapt to new communication contexts. Along these processes, they undergo more complex changes such as coadaptation and speciation. This has allowed for the scissors meme as a symbol of economic cutbacks to permeate society, and for its metaphorical use to occupy many disparate communication scenarios, unlike other symbolic elements that were also used, but turned out to be less cognitively efficient and therefore offered fewer evolutionary possibilities.
Exploring Collaborative Modeling as Teaching Method
2012
Group Model Building (GMB) often refers to collaborative system dynamics (SD) modeling. Despite its impressive success in various interdisciplinary domains, SD still struggles to be adopted as a mainstream method in the very areas where it has proven its worth. SD is hard to learn, and acquiring modeling skills can take long time. SD is mostly taught in modeling courses with examples from various disciplines, in a non-collaborative way. Learning SD modeling as a "byproduct" in courses (like ICT, security, industrial management) and in collaborative way would seem at the outset a losing proposition. Experiences with an approach using a project-oriented approach adapting ideas and exercises f…
Evolution of metaphors: Phylogeny of oil slick cartoons in Spanish press
2014
The main purpose of this article is to analyze the evolution of a metaphor set over time. By studying cartoons about the oil slick caused by the Prestige oil tanker in 2002 on Spanish shores and the subsequent court decision in 2013, we observe a progressive metaphor diversification and evolution, with the oil slick as an old common trait. Additionally, using basic cladistical methods, we propose a phylogenetic tree for the metaphor set, from a common ancestor to the subsequent diversification regarding news content. These results show that phylogenetic models can be very helpful in understanding the evolution of conceptual metaphors, and this method of analysis could even be a methodologi…