I’ve just uploaded on SocArXiv a new preprint, A cultural evolution approach to digital media, where I suggest (surprise!) that cultural evolution provides some interesting tools to analyse digital media.
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I just published, together with Claudio Tennie and Alex Mesoudi, a new paper in Royal Society Open Science: Social learning solves the problem of narrow-peaked search landscapes: experimental evidence in humans.
Almost three years ago I programmed a simple twitterbot (see here), namely a Python script that was posting every hour, when available, news or blog posts related to cultural evolution – hence the name @CultEvoBot. While the goal of the endeavour was mainly to see how difficult was to build something like that (it was easy!), and to use potentially what I learnt for other projects (I never did, but who knows!), @CultEvoBot was relatively useful and posted links to interesting sources, the majority of the time.
One of the articles of my holiday-accumulated reading list was, given my current interest in the effects of digital media on cultural transmission and evolution (see here), Katherine Viner’s How technology disrupted the truth, a long read of the Guardian. The piece got extensive – and almost exclusively positive – attention (there are, when I write, 1,589 comments and around 64,000 shares). In fact, I found it quite hideous, and I believe it also embodies a widespread common-sense attitude towards digital technologies, and social media in particular, so I decided to write here some comments.
Continue reading “Did technology disrupt the truth? Probably not”
As I mentioned in a previous post, I am beginning to collect some thoughts and materials for a project around the topic “Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age”. The goal of the exercise would be to investigate how new digital technologies change the process of cultural transmission and evolution, using methodological tools and ideas from cultural evolution theory (intended in a quite broad sense).
