My book, "Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age" was out a few weeks ago. As promised, I follow with some threads on the content of individual chapters. Here the seventh. 1/8 amazon.co.uk/Cultural-Evolu… 
It starts discussing the concept of “meme” (not surprisingly, giving the topic of the book…) and why cultural evolutionists tend to be sceptical of the idea of replicators in cultural evolution 2/8
I take seriously - I hope - the criticism coming from cultural attraction theory, mainly that we cannot assume hi-fi copying from the observation of cultural stability 3/8
My take is that *both* reconstruction *and* copying are important in cultural transmission, and their relative importance varies in different domains, and with different supports, a point previously made in this paper 4/8 link.springer.com/article/10.100…
Digital transmission, in particular, provides many of what I call “fidelity amplifiers”, it is cheap, fast, very precise, provides mechanisms of repairs, and facilitate the transmission of tacit knowledge with video, comments, etc. 5/8 youtube.com/watch?v=P73REg…
I discuss *internet* memes, showing that, despite the fidelity offered by the medium, and what we generally assume, they are also subject to reconstructions, and successful memes are often the results of a history of modifications 6/8 medium.com/@CRA1G/the-evo…
Online transmission, however, does potentially increase fidelity. I discuss how this differs from the usual experiments in cultural evolution, where the transmitted material needs to be remembered and reproduced (think the telephone game). 7/8
This generated an exponential increase of available cultural traits. Is this good or online cultural is simply generating more junk than before? This is the topic of the next (and last) chapter! 8/8
The goodies: copied-and-pasted Facebook memes have a surprisingly high "mutation rate" - 11% facebook.com/notes/facebook…
Do your own "Hitler react" video captiongenerator.com/make-a-hitler-…
Why the story of Cinderella is still with us? It is copied faithfully or reconstructed each time, or both?
