In our digital age, the interaction between culture, cultural evolution, and cultural transmission has become increasingly crucial. This post delves into essential concepts such as culture, cultural evolution, and their interplay with new communication technologies. By exploring definitions and theories from various scientific fields, I aim to deepen our understanding of how culture evolves and shapes our interactions in the modern world.
The concept of culture includes all types of science, such as linguistics, psychology, humanities, philosophy, and economics (Morin, 2015). Therefore, many definitions might be found about this concept according to its branch. This post takes the two most common definitions in the scientific field:
From the previous definitions, we can infer that culture includes features of distribution and transmission that last and get diffused in time and space between a particular society and its individuals. The notion of culture is seen as an integrated package with a coherent structure that characterises societies’ mental and symbolic lives. Regardless of the difference of point of views regarding whether the individual acquires culture from his society, or the individual is the one who creates culture and transfers it to his society, it is an interesting topic but will not be discussed in this post.
Cultural evolution is a scientific field that studies human cultural behaviour and partly non-human cultural behaviour. In this post, we will not touch the non-human cultural behaviour part. Human cultural behaviour is about behaviours transmitted through social learning rather than individual learning or genetic inheritance. In other words, the evolution of an individual’s culture from the environment around him through the evolution of uniquely human forms of cooperation, the cultural evolution of language, and the trends in contemporary culture (Acerbi, 2019).
It is important to recognise that humans are a cultural species. Culture is central to understanding humans due to humans’ need of specialised cultural information. We depend on our survival on this large body of information accumulated non-genetically from one generation to another, for example, humans use this to find food, process it, make tools necessary for getting food, build shelters and medicines, etc (Acerbi, 2019).
Human adaptations for cultural learning are genetically evolved adaptations. Natural selection has shaped our minds to make us better cultural learners. That is to make a separation between genes and culture, allowing us to make cultural evolution (Henrich. J. 2018).
Figure 1 visualises the cultural evolution according to Joe Henrich.
Human beings have used the logic of natural selection to understand the psychological mechanisms that allow us to acquire cultural learning and to build mathematical models which describe social processes of interaction between people, some learning and some payoffs. Some social interactions that help explain aspects of religion, e.g. can help us understand why some aspects of religion seem universally shared. Moreover, it can help us understand why technologies can become so sophisticated and why larger and more integrated societies tend to produce faster adaptive rates of cumulative cultural evolution leading to fancier technologies and larger technical repertoires. It can explain why languages are so variable (Pertierra, 2017).
Similarly, large societies have more words, such as English, Chinese and Arabic. Social norms and cooperation approach help us understand why ethnic groups seem to be widespread in the world and what the nature of our ethnic psychology is. It is good to remember that these cultural products have been operated over hundreds or maybe thousands of years of human evolution and have fed back to shape our genetic evolution. So we are a product of this gene-culture coevolution (Acerbi, 2019).
The new forms of communication technology have an impact on our cognitive evolution. This new way of receiving information to gain new knowledge or enrich our understanding of a specific topic could impact how our cognition evolves.
In the 16th century, people were worried about the printing press’s evolution because they thought about the huge amount of available books and how they would remember everything. Thus they evolved cognitive techniques, which means instead of cognitive memory being rewarded, people started to use indexes and notes. The processing of information nowadays is already happening, similar to what happened with books, it is more important to know how to retrieve information than memorise them. For example, the most important thing for any programmer is to know how to copy and paste from GitHub. The most important thing for the programmer to know is to copy and paste from GitHub (Acerbi, 2019). Without a connection to the internet, programmers would not be able to write a line of code (Pertierra, 2017). There will be more examples of how modern communication technology has affected our cognitive system in “New communication technologies” post.
Cultural transmission means passing on our material, e.g. Walkman, and non-material cultures, e.g. an idea, not only in person but even across generations (Henrich, 2016). Digital technology allows us to share and transfer our culture even to strangers that we have never met face to face (Acerbi, 2019). I will explain it in an example, simply put, suppose one is planning to move to Gothenburg to study at Gothenburg university. A person who knows very little about the Gothenburg region might learn general information about Gothenburg in a history class. One starts the process of cultural transmission by watching youtube videos and vlogs, reading some blogs regarding that city, and following a few Gothenburgers influencers on social media. One learns that Gothenburg is known for its commercial fishing hub, so it will be exciting to try a shrimp sandwich in Gothia tower.
In conclusion, this post has delved into the dynamic relationship between culture and digital media, particularly through the lens of cultural evolution. It has underscored the significance of these insights for understanding human behavior and technological advancements. By highlighting the continuous evolution of cultural practices in response to technological changes, we have demonstrated the profound impact of digital media on our cognitive and social landscapes. As we contemplate the future: How will emerging technologies further transform cultural evolution in the coming decades? And, what ethical considerations should guide our interactions with these evolving digital cultures?
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