Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age
Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age

Author: Alberto Acerbi

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0198835949

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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.

Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age
Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age

Author: Alberto Acerbi

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0198835949

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

Sharing
Sharing

Author: Philippe Aigrain

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 9089643850

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"In the past fifteen years, file sharing of digital cultural works between individuals has been at the center of a number of debates on the future of culture itself. To some, sharing constitutes piracy, to be fought against and eradicated. Others see it as unavoidable, and table proposals to compensate for its harmful effects. Meanwhile, little progress has been made towards addressing the real challenges facing culture in a digital world. Sharing starts from a radically different viewpoint, namely that the non-market sharing of digital works is both legitimate and useful. It supports this premise with empirical research, demonstrating that non-market sharing leads to more diversity in the attention given to various works. Taking stock of what we have learned about the cultural economy in recent years, Sharing sets out the conditions necessary for valuable cultural functions to remain sustainable in this context."--[P] 4 of cover.

Oral Literature in the Digital Age
Oral Literature in the Digital Age

Author: Mark Turin

Publisher: Open Book Publishers

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1909254304

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Thanks to ever-greater digital connectivity, interest in oral traditions has grown beyond that of researcher and research subject to include a widening pool of global users. When new publics consume, manipulate and connect with field recordings and digital cultural archives, their involvement raises important practical and ethical questions. This volume explores the political repercussions of studying marginalised languages; the role of online tools in ensuring responsible access to sensitive cultural materials; and ways of ensuring that when digital documents are created, they are not fossilised as a consequence of being archived. Fieldwork reports by linguists and anthropologists in three continents provide concrete examples of overcoming barriers -- ethical, practical and conceptual -- in digital documentation projects. Oral Literature In The Digital Age is an essential guide and handbook for ethnographers, field linguists, community activists, curators, archivists, librarians, and all who connect with indigenous communities in order to document and preserve oral traditions.

Individual-Based Models of Cultural Evolution
Individual-Based Models of Cultural Evolution

Author: Alberto Acerbi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 9781003282068

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"Individual-Based Models of Cultural Evolution shows readers how to create individual-based models of cultural evolution using the programming language R. The field of cultural evolution has emerged in the last few decades as a thriving, interdisciplinary effort to understand cultural change and cultural diversity within an evolutionary framework and using evolutionary tools, concepts and methods"--

Cultural Evolution
Cultural Evolution

Author: Peter J. Richerson

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2013-11-01

Total Pages: 499

ISBN-13: 0262019752

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Leading scholars report on current research that demonstrates the central role of cultural evolution in explaining human behavior. Over the past few decades, a growing body of research has emerged from a variety of disciplines to highlight the importance of cultural evolution in understanding human behavior. Wider application of these insights, however, has been hampered by traditional disciplinary boundaries. To remedy this, in this volume leading researchers from theoretical biology, developmental and cognitive psychology, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, religious studies, history, and economics come together to explore the central role of cultural evolution in different aspects of human endeavor. The contributors take as their guiding principle the idea that cultural evolution can provide an important integrating function across the various disciplines of the human sciences, as organic evolution does for biology. The benefits of adopting a cultural evolutionary perspective are demonstrated by contributions on social systems, technology, language, and religion. Topics covered include enforcement of norms in human groups, the neuroscience of technology, language diversity, and prosociality and religion. The contributors evaluate current research on cultural evolution and consider its broader theoretical and practical implications, synthesizing past and ongoing work and sketching a roadmap for future cross-disciplinary efforts. Contributors Quentin D. Atkinson, Andrea Baronchelli, Robert Boyd, Briggs Buchanan, Joseph Bulbulia, Morten H. Christiansen, Emma Cohen, William Croft, Michael Cysouw, Dan Dediu, Nicholas Evans, Emma Flynn, Pieter François, Simon Garrod, Armin W. Geertz, Herbert Gintis, Russell D. Gray, Simon J. Greenhill, Daniel B. M. Haun, Joseph Henrich, Daniel J. Hruschka, Marco A. Janssen, Fiona M. Jordan, Anne Kandler, James A. Kitts, Kevin N. Laland, Laurent Lehmann, Stephen C. Levinson, Elena Lieven, Sarah Mathew, Robert N. McCauley, Alex Mesoudi, Ara Norenzayan, Harriet Over, Jürgen Renn, Victoria Reyes-García, Peter J. Richerson, Stephen Shennan, Edward G. Slingerland, Dietrich Stout, Claudio Tennie, Peter Turchin, Carel van Schaik, Matthijs Van Veelen, Harvey Whitehouse, Thomas Widlok, Polly Wiessner, David Sloan Wilson

The Acceleration of Cultural Change
The Acceleration of Cultural Change

Author: R. Alexander Bentley

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2017-08-25

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 0262036959

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How culture evolves through algorithms rather than knowledge inherited from ancestors. From our hunter-gatherer days, we humans evolved to be excellent throwers, chewers, and long-distance runners. We are highly social, crave Paleolithic snacks, and display some gendered difference resulting from mate selection. But we now find ourselves binge-viewing, texting while driving, and playing Minecraft. Only the collective acceleration of cultural and technological evolution explains this development. The evolutionary psychology of individuals—the drive for “food and sex”—explains some of our current habits, but our evolutionary success, Alex Bentley and Mike O'Brien explain, lies in our ability to learn cultural know-how and to teach it to the next generation. Today, we are following social media bots as much as we are learning from our ancestors. We are radically changing the way culture evolves. Bentley and O'Brien describe how the transmission of culture has become vast and instantaneous across an Internet of people and devices, after millennia of local ancestral knowledge that evolved slowly. Long-evolved cultural knowledge is aggressively discounted by online algorithms, which prioritize popularity and recency. If children are learning more from Minecraft than from tradition, this is a profound shift in cultural evolution. Bentley and O'Brien examine the broad and shallow model of cultural evolution seen today in the science of networks, prediction markets, and the explosion of digital information. They suggest that in the future, artificial intelligence could be put to work to solve the problem of information overload, learning to integrate concepts over the vast idea space of digitally stored information.

Young Children Playing and Learning in a Digital Age
Young Children Playing and Learning in a Digital Age

Author: Christine Stephen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-27

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1317224973

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Young Children Playing and Learning in a Digital Age explores the emergence of the digital age and young children’s experiences with digital technologies at home and in educational environments. Drawing on theory and research-based evidence, this book makes an important contribution to understanding the contemporary experiences of young children in the digital age. It argues that a cultural and critically informed perspective allows educators, policy-makers and parents to make sense of children’s digital experiences as they play and learn, enabling informed decision-making about future early years curriculum and practices at home and in early learning and care settings. An essential read for researchers, students, policy-makers and professionals working with children today, this book draws attention to the evolution of digital developments and the relationship between contemporary technologies, play and learning in the early years.

The Digital Evolution of Live Music
The Digital Evolution of Live Music

Author: Angela Jones

Publisher: Chandos Publishing

Published: 2015-07-17

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 0081000707

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The concept of ‘live’ has changed as a consequence of mediated culture. Interaction may occur in real time, but not necessarily in shared physical spaces with others. The Digital Evolution of Live Music considers notions of live music in time and space as influenced by digital technology. This book presents the argument that live music is a special case in digital experience due to its liminal status between mind and body, words and feelings, sight and sound, virtual and real. Digital live music occupies a multimodal role in a cultural contextual landscape shaped by technological innovation. The book consists of three sections. The first section looks at fan perspectives, digital technology and the jouissance of live music and music festival fans. The second section discusses music in popular culture, exploring YouTube and live music video culture and gaming soundtracks, followed by the concluding section which investigates the future of live music and digital culture. Gives perspectives on the function of live music in digital culture and the role of digital in live music Focuses on the interaction between live and digital music Takes the discussion of live music beyond economics and marketing, to the cultural and philosophical implications of digital culture for the art Includes interviews with producers and players in the digital world of music production Furthers debate by looking at access to digital music via social media, websites, and applications that recognise the impact of digital culture on the live music experience

Society in the Digital Age
Society in the Digital Age

Author: William Housley

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2021-04-28

Total Pages: 113

ISBN-13: 1526486288

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In Digital Society: An Interactionist Perspective, William Housley explores the ways interactionist thinking contributes to our understanding of current trends and topics within digital sociology. Drawing on a range of aligned approaches, concepts and empirical studies, he explores how notions of self and presentation, action and agency, practical reason and interaction are of fundamental importance to our understanding of some of the emerging contours of digital society; inclusive of big data, social media, the social life of methods, algorithmic culture, ‘artificial intelligence’ and the pivot to voice. In doing so, Housley aims to demonstrate the enduring relevance of work associated with Goffman, Garfinkel and Sacks in understanding everyday digital social life. The book provides a range of insights into how sociology and social science continues to draw upon interactionism and aligned traditions such as ethnomethodology in making sense of the Interaction Order 2.0 and beyond.