Collective cognition, culture, mind share and patterns of action

Ubuntu: Just how popular is it? - Starry Hope Productions...Ubuntu has managed to gain a large portion of the Linux mind share, at least amongst the tech community.

Wikipedia: Mind share is the amount of attention required by something and the time spent thinking about something. It can also refer to the development of consumer awareness about a specific product or brand in hopes that they will buy the product or brand. One of the main objectives of advertising and promotion is to establish what is called mind share, or share of mind.

There's an misalignment of concepts here that illustrates nicely the problems of locating collective concepts such as language, culture in the minds of the individuals. On the one hand, there is no doubt that to speak a language or to behave as a recognizable member of a culture, something has to be happening inside the individual (mostly but not exclusively the brain). However, our access to these concepts is mostly through the collective. Even notions such as 'private language' whether possible or not (and the theoretical 'private culture'), are secondary and defined in contrast to their default framings as collective concepts.

It isn't just a question of access. Theoretically, we could study the individual's body/brain/mind to get to the bottom of how the collective is represented there. The problem is that this kind of reductionism would deprive us of an important level of description. This is similar to the fractal notion (as I understand it, anyway). It is possible to reduce anything to something else, but an important part of that original something is lost. So basically, when we're describing the collective by reducing it to the neural or mental, we're describing something functionally and essentially different than when we're describing it as a collective phenomenon.

The Starry Hope analysis is particularly interesting because it uses purely collective measures to infer both a collective notion (popularity) and an individual notion (mind share). There are interesting folk theories of mental causality at play here.