Written by Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash is a story about a future-day hacker/ninja/pizza delivery boy who, after finding out about an ancient linguistic disease which is soon to be unleashed on the world, goes out to stop a biker with a nuke strapped to him from delivering this plague to the mass populace through the medium of the internet. The basic theme plays on the idea of the tower of babel, and implies that the people there were struck with a disease which split them apart linguistically. This is a memonic virus that the target needs only to hear or read before they start to lose most of their mental capacity and wail incoherently. The idea plays off of memes, ideas which replicate and transmit themselves through human communication. Some memes, such as the very english language, are self-producing, in that the very knowledge of them makes the listener want to repeat them to another person (thus starting the process over).
I find the idea of a virus that needs just be heard to induce symptoms to be interesting. The basic idea that the book gives is that the brain is structured in such a way, linguistically, that words themselves can change the pattern in the brain (it seems to assumes that thought is all linguistic). Thus, if one encountered a very specific set of phonemes, their brain would essentially shut down in parts, and they would start wailing out incomprehensible broken words, which is what is implied happened at the tower of Babel so that humans would not build the great tower.
While an interesting theory, I doubt the veracity of the idea. I myself do not believe that people think only in linguistics. Instead, I would say that they think conceptually and that letters and phonemes are just so often used in communication that our brains have paths for them built right into our minds.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
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