Social Media as Windows on the Social Life of the Mind

TL;DR

This paper explores how social media can be used to study cultural evolution and collective cognition, proposing new methods to analyze social organization and diffusion effects in social science research.

Contribution

It outlines two new directions for social media research: examining cultural change beyond adaptationist views and analyzing social organization's role in collective cognition.

Findings

Social media data can test diffusion-based explanations of cultural phenomena.

Social media can reveal how social organization supports collective cognitive performance.

Proposes new methodologies for social science using social media insights.

Abstract

This is a programmatic paper, marking out two directions in which the study of social media can contribute to broader problems of social science: understanding cultural evolution and understanding collective cognition. Under the first heading, I discuss some difficulties with the usual, adaptationist explanations of cultural phenomena, alternative explanations involving network diffusion effects, and some ways these could be tested using social-media data. Under the second I describe some of the ways in which social media could be used to study how the social organization of an epistemic community supports its collective cognitive performance.