Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age

by Alberto Acerbi

From emails to social media, from instant messaging to political memes, the way we produce and transmit culture is radically changing. Understanding the consequences of the massive diffusion of digital media is of the utmost importance, both from the intellectual and the social point of view.

'Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age' proposes that a specific discipline - cultural evolution - provides an excellent framework to analyse our digital age. Cultural evolution is a vibrant, interdisciplinary, and increasingly productive scientific framework that aims to provide a naturalistic and quantitative explanation of culture. In the book the author shows how cultural evolution offers both a sophisticated view of human behaviour, grounded in cognitive science and evolutionary theory, and a strong quantitative and experimental methodology. The book examines in depth various topics that directly originate from the application of cultural evolution research to digital media.
Is online social influence radically different from previous forms of social influence? Do digital media amplify the effects of popularity and celebrity influence? What are the psychological forces that favour the spread of online misinformation? What are the effects of the hyper-availability of information online on cultural cumulation? The cultural evolutionary perspective provides novel insights, and a relatively encouraging take on the overall effects of our online activities on our culture.

Cultural Evolution is an area of rapidly growing interest, and this timely book will be important reading for students and researchers in the fields of psychology, anthropology, cognitive science, and the media.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Technology

272 pages, Paperback

Published February 3, 2020

Reviews

[Alexander Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of this book was summary reading for me. While this book fashions itself as a philosophy read, it is mostly a review of cultural evolution in a dominantly online space. It is more of a review of social, psychological, and information science of cultural evolution as enabled by modern data resources.

While I learned new ideas and got good citations, primarily this book should be used as an overview of topics in the overlap of sociotechnical sciences and culture studies. Certain chapters of this book are well suited to a masters or PhD level course on digital culture, or communication and information science. There are some sections of the book that meander more so than get to a point of where research is heading.

Probably one of the better contributions of this book is explaining where memetics historically has gone and its difficulties as a science, and also explaining the tradeoffs between crowd sourced knowledge versus individuated knowledge development. These two particular chapters are of primary importance.

[Nat]

Pairs well with Mercier's Not Born Yesterday by deflating some over-hyped worries about the negative effects of online media. I'll definitely be using some of the chapters on disinformation as a counterpoint to recent alarmist work on propaganda in the next version of my truth and bullshit class.

[Arnaud Schenk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well researched, and convincing. In bad need of a more detailed oriented editor.

[szymborskalyte · Rating 2 out of 5]

All over the place, like a bad Annual Review piece.

[Nik · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well balanced book about culture in the digital age through the methods of cultural evolution and cognitive anthropology. Well-written and easy to follow text with the occasional witty remarks.

[Victoria Oldemburgo De Mello · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a researcher in the field of psychology of social media, I found most of the information on this book repetitive. But if you’re new to the topic, I think this book is a great start to understanding how much we really understand of the impact of social media in our lives. Contrary to popular documentary movies (such as “the social dilemma”), Acerbi takes on the theme are pondered and balanced. He acknowledges the lack of causal evidence for the influence of social media and yet discusses the possible ways in which social media might be an instrument for cultural evolution. So if you want to dig into the nuances of how social media influences us, this is a good book.

[Riccardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

well researched and sober discussion of the effects of social media on social and cultural dynamics, under the lens of our current scientific understanding of social learning and cultural evolution.