October 2023
Intermediate to advanced
232 pages
5h 17m
English
‘Language is a virus’, wrote electronic music pioneer Laurie Anderson in a song of the same name, released in 1986.1 Anderson was channelling Beat Generation writer William S Burroughs, shortening an observation in his 1962 novel The Ticket That Exploded, that ‘language is a virus from outer space’.2 Without going down the rabbit hole of Burroughs’s ideas about technology and communication, it will suffice to say that both were pointing out how, through human language, ideas take on a life of their own, transmitting from person to person, across cultures, carrying with them various conceptual payloads.
Richard Dawkins reframed this with the term ‘meme’, ...
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