Cultural contagion in a new key

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Notes

1. Engels spoke of the transition from mere quantitative change to qualitative change as a process whereby growth reaches what we could call a tipping-point leading to the total transformation of the system. In other words, he saw his own revolutionary dreams fulfilled in nature, yet the idea of threshold values is respectable and used to good effect in system theory, ecology and elsewhere, for example in Marshall McLuhan's ‘tetrads’ where a particular media phenomenon, given sufficient growth, suddenly ‘flips into its opposite’. (Nice idea? Definitely. Good idea? Perhaps not.)