Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age

Author:

Acerbi Alberto

Abstract

From emails to social media, from instant messaging to political memes, the way we produce and transmit culture is radically changing. This book uses, for the first time, cultural evolution theory to analyze how information spreads, and how it affects our behavior in the digital age. Online connectedness and digital media allows access to networks where cultural transmission is possible, increasing both the availability of cultural models (from whom we can copy) and our reach (the number of individuals who can copy from us). This poses new problems, and new opportunities (Chapter 1). A cognitive and evolutionary approach suggests that we are wary learners, and the power of social influence, either online or offline, is often overestimated (Chapter 2). The background developed in the initial chapters into the details of different online phenomena is used: the tendency to copy popular individuals (Chapter 3), popular opinions (Chapter 4), or exchange information only with same-minded individuals (Chapter 5). The spread of online misinformation is then scrutinized at length (Chapter 6), proposing that to understand the phenomenon we need to understand why, generally, some information is more successful in spreading than other. The last two chapters examine how online, digital, transmission is different from other forms of cultural transmission, providing more “fidelity amplifiers” (Chapter 7), and how this could affect future cultural cumulation (Chapter 8). Overall, it is proposed that a “long view” to the current situation, based on a personal perspective of cognitive and evolutionary approaches to culture, suggests that some of the dangers of digital, online, interactions may have been overestimated, and the opportunities still ahead of us are discussed.

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Cited by 37 articles. 订阅此论文施引文献 订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献

1. Norm Dynamics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Social Norm Emergence, Persistence, and Change;Annual Review of Psychology;2024-01-18

2. Modeling opinion misperception and the emergence of silence in online social system;PLOS ONE;2024-01-11

3. How do online users respond to crowdsourced fact-checking?;Humanities and Social Sciences Communications;2023-11-25

4. Machine culture;Nature Human Behaviour;2023-11-20

5. Modelling the user polarization of echo chambers, using network science methods;2023 IEEE 23rd International Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Informatics (CINTI);2023-11-20

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