“Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age” Book Club General Discussion
Join the discussion of our Book Club here!
You will find on the Book Club page: the précis of the book by Alberto Acerbi, commentaries by Alex Mesoudi, Hugo Mercier, Mathieu Charbonneau, Olivier
Alberto Acerbi’s response: There is much work to do
It was a great pleasure having a book club dedicated to Cultural evolution in the digital age. Writing a book feels like a long and solitary experience and it is comforting that, when done, it may
Truth is not always the point
Thank you, Alberto, for writing this book! In addition to being a captivating reading, it shed light on some thoughts I had on how people share information on social media, and what truth has to do
Cultural evolution – The mystery of production
Alberto Acerbi’s book is not just an impressive and timely summary of our knowledge of cultural transmission in the digital world (that in itself would be a good reason to read it). It also
The Participatory Age
Of central interest to Alberto, and to cultural evolutionists in general, are the impacts of the transmission of cultural information from one person to the next—what is transmitted to whom, where
Consuming vs. sharing information online
In his brilliant book, Alberto notes a series of significant differences between information sharing in oral cultures and online (to take two extremes). Oral cultures are dependent on memorization
Cultural transmission, reinvention, and progress
I sometimes wonder why some of the cleverest things about the digital age seem to date from before the digital age really started. Few philosophical analyses beat thought experiments like Turing's
What’s the recipe?
In his book, Alberto pointed out that information can now be passed on, and ultimately become cultural, without being memorized or even understood. But online information can also become cultural
Are humans ‘wary learners’?
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Alberto Acerbi’s Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age (Acerbi, 2019). It provides not only a much-needed corrective to overblown claims about the power of social media
A précis of ‘Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age’
When, at the beginning of 2016, I started to think about the project that would have become the book Cultural evolution in the digital age, my goal was to apply cultural evolution theory to a topic
‘Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age’ Book Club
Alberto Acerbi’s timely new book, Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age, offers a cultural evolutionary perspective on our behavior online, and on its cumulative effects on information diffusion