The reality of evolution could not be more different. We as Homo sapiens are part of a process that has spread across the planet since life began here and is continuing right now. The process involves organisms adapting to environments that provide ecological niches for some but not others and continual adaptation, thriving and multiplying, or being unable to adapt and becoming extinct working over the centuries and millennia. So we are one species amongst many. So is the coelacanth . This ugly fish was presumed to have died out 66 million years ago when it was discovered in 1938. What has it been doing all that time? Living deep down in the ocean where nothing much changes over generations of fish and the environment remained roughly the same. The coelacanth survived but did not adapt by changing because there was no need to. If this fish marks the end point of a spectrum of adaptation, then we are near the other end 8 where adaptation occurs frequently, albeit on a time scale where each individual human life is one tick of the clock.
How are the two metaphors of evolution, the ‘steps’ and the ‘spreading net’ versions, relevant to a gradual disappearance of physical products into virtual versions? Here’s an example. It’s June 1967 and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band has just been released as an LP. 9 It goes to the top of the charts and everyone wants to buy a copy. Many houses have record players as that’s what they’re called now as the old word ‘gramophone’ is not used much as it’s old fashioned and refers to a fixed piece of furniture on a par with the ‘wireless’ or ‘television set’ as a necessary part of the ‘living room’. Record players are portable and can be used in your bedroom. Friends can come to your house and go upstairs and listen to this record which had such an impact on the culture of the 1960s worldwide. Some readers will remember being there at that time and others can ask their parents or more likely grandparents what it was like. 51 years later I am sitting with some of my family in part of our open plan house and we laugh and I shout ‘OK Google!’ (Pause) ‘Play Spotify Ed Sheeran’. The TV is on somewhere and we listen to the tuneful Sheeran for a minute and my daughter says ‘stop’ and we talk about something else. 51 years is a long time for products and you might think the radically different consumption scenarios I have described simply reflect how products called ‘music’ have moved on through the classic process of the product life cycle of introduction, growth, maturity and decline. But vinyl is still here and I can wander down a local street full of coffee shops and artisan products like expensive cheese stores and second-hand book sellers until I find vinyl and there are old LP covers in the window from the 60s and 70s including one of Sergeant Pepper…. Music hasn’t declined but it has changed and the model of a spreading net can explain it better than a rather rigid set of steps. The ecology of popular music in the 60s included the Hit Parade, buying singles regularly at stores like HMV or Woolworths on Saturday mornings, listening to music on your ‘transistor’ (small portable radios) and watching TV shows like Ready Steady Go and Top of the Pops, fronted by male presenters. Buying recorded music at that time meant buying records, and the main choice parameters were the singer (e.g. Elvis Presley), group (e.g. The Beatles) or genre (pop, jazz, folk, and classical). As a consumer choice it was heavily influenced by self-related aspects and you would see yourself and expect others to see you in a certain way by your choice of music. As LPs were not cheap, they were bought occasionally or you might get one or two as birthday presents. ‘Singles’ were bought regularly e.g. Saturday mornings and were often based on the hit parade. Half a century on and vinyl has made a revival. The physicality of ‘playing a record’ coupled with the attraction of old album covers means a specialist market for vinyl records has emerged. This is not to say that it wasn’t there before but as it was a mass market before then, the selling points were the music. So the new ecology of consuming vinyl changes the way we adapt to obtaining music and the ecology of 2018 suggests a new way of consuming music. Borrowing the metaphor of evolution as a network, for some genres such as classical music then in the 1960s, the extent to which new genres would emerge and merge with others was limited and this was more of a steady state or mature market. There was little biodiversity there but pop music, largely due to the Beatles 10 was changing all the time and providing a rich environment for evolving genres using orchestrated sequences for example and later utilising digital techniques such as sampling on a regular basis.
The field of cultural evolution has a long history and much of it tainted by, in my opinion the ‘stair-step’ model of evolutionary change where homo sapiens is of course at the top. However the concept of meme has proved useful. According to Saad (2012), the meme was introduced into current parlance by Dawkins (1976, Chapter 11) and is the cultural counterpart of the gene. Memes often exist in clusters or memeplexes and these according to Saad are the same as culturally diffused belief systems such as religion. Whether they are part of our evolutionary heritage or just useful cultural tools that have evolved as, for example universals of thought or language is for me unresolved although Saad adopts the evolutionary line. Evolution in the cultural sense has become potentially very fast in a digital environment where information with memetic qualities can spread exponentially. What contributes to a meme that has this ability to spread so quickly? Shifman (2011) looked at successful YouTube memes that had spread this way but only those where the theme is reproduced with “…parody, pastiche, mash-ups or other derivative work” (op. cit., p. 190). Creative user engagement is involved and users contribute rather than just being passive transmitters of an iconic , viral episode. 11 Shifman identified several characteristics of these memetic videos 12 and they were: focussing on ordinary people, flawed masculinity, humour, simplicity, repetitiveness and whimsical content. Each of these characteristics provides an opportunity for the viewer to contribute by changing and sending on. Viral videos, those that are shared and transmitted again and again but not used as raw material to work on as with a memetic video need to evoke the emotions of joy and surprise from the beginning and create an emotional roller-coaster throughout, use the brand discreetly, and surprise but don’t shock (Teixeira, 2012). What ad checks all the boxes? According to the author it’s Evian’s Roller Babies (Premi, 2012). Also the most responsive audience for forwarding viral video are egocentric extraverts. Get your marketing department to identify the demographics of that sector now!
In summary, dematerialisation is a term coined by Belk (2013) to describe the process where your physical stuff becomes transformed into virtual property. There is a temptation in my opinion to see this as a gradual cultural shift, evolution and progress toward a different way of consuming and living. Consequently I took the opportunity to explore the cultural evolution of virtual versions of our current physical reality using the emergence of a dominant digital music consumer ecology together with a renascent and thriving vinyl consumptionscape. 13
What does Belk have to say about dematerialisation? The immediate effect is both a loss and gain. The palpability and immediacy of handling and putting away is gone but your treasured music collection is now reassuringly still there and accessible at the touch of a button so all can see if you display that side of yourself on Facebook . As I see it there is a gradual tendency to shift the centre of gravity of your identity into cyberspace when you can show and display and live and spend time with other likeminded participants. However one’s physical identity is still there, from your skin inwards it’s still you tapping on a smart phone or tablet or PC. There are proximal parts of you, soft clothes, chairs, boots or running shoes on floors and pavements as you interact with your immediate environment . But the distal 14 environment has gone into cyberspace and your home looks bare and perhaps more elegant and minimalist for that.
Re-embodiment
Acting and acting out have both been parts of the human condition since we first developed the skills required to be a social animal. Communication is a social activity and performance is something we still do and we see no reason to desist from it. The skills are ancie
nt but what is new is the extent to which we can achieve verisimilitude in the settings of our performance, when the participant is the performer. We have already achieved this with cinema and the tale of the audience stampeding out of the theatre when a film of a train entering a station was shown in 1896 may be apocryphal (Grundhauser, 2016) but must have had a certain ring of authenticity in order to become an urban legend . Certainly I recollect watching in amazement at the dinosaurs when the first of the Jurassic Park series of movies was shown in 1993 and now anything is possible on the big screen.
When you appear online you are free to appear as a representation of your choice. This can start with social media when you airbrush your image using a filter on Instagram for example, and exchange images, emoticons and make friends. There are also games where you create a new you and participate as that avatar . Then the suspension of disbelief can be total when the avatar has become your persona, an aspect of your character. However the mask of being online can isolate the individual from his offline values and cultural norms and bullying and aggressive verbal behaviour known as ‘trolling ’ can occur. The extent to which individuals can escape from their bodies is debatable I think and until we have an effective integration between the sophisticated and authentic real-time audio-visual environments that are available for role playing and augmented reality dealing with all the senses it will be difficult to claim that we can operate in a computerised world that simulates real life. In any case if we take embodied cognition seriously then much of our thinking, feeling and decision making were originally anchored in bodily actions.
Distributed Memory
Belk also discusses the extent to which living in the virtual world can extend our own physical limitations to the extent we can rely on virtual reality as a prosthetic mind, a source of information that smart search engines can produce and can also learn our needs from familiar themes in past searches. Certainly that’s something that makes writing this book easier and the days of sitting in a vast library while an assistant brings you a pile of requested books to pore over are fortunately gone for most of us. 15 As I write this several windows and tabs are open and I am simultaneously searching for sources, rephrasing previous text, visiting a colleague in Australia through her cv looking for latest publications and forgetting about syntax and spelling as we leave that sort of thing to the electronic servants. I can Skype family and friends and colleagues. I am tempted to follow with ‘But when was the last time I…’ and to pre-empt you of course there are certain things that are best left to human relationships or communing with nature. Nevertheless our world has changed and change is good—usually. Which provides me with a neat segue into….
The Social Internet
Our relations with other people on the internet and in social media in particular have already been discussed (see section on “Self and Identity in Adolescence” in Chapter 10) but there is another aspect that fits in well with Belk’s interests when he talks of sharing. This vision of the internet as a public forum means that your self-presentation is potentially available to everyone using the internet and you too can go viral. Internet communication affords a wide range of possible outcomes from the positive and benign to the malign. So I can find friends (or ‘friends’), potential partners, common interest groups. I can present myself in a positive light and in moments of madness, self-representations that are less than flattering. Growing up with the internet, as so-called millennials many of whom are also known as ‘digital natives’ do, means that your internet behaviour which is potentially there for ever can return to haunt you when you applying for a job where the self -presentation strategies are worlds away from the ones you thought so cool at those parties you went to aged 16. The communication is not face-to-face where you can see, hear, smell and touch the other person and interaction that is going bad can be mended. Internet interactions in real time can flare up and become disinhibited.
Academic research on social media (Facebook ) was summarised in a useful paper by Wilson , Gosling, and Graham (2012). Their conclusions were given under five heads and are summarised now.
��s contact and harassment which you don’t want, stalkers and paedophiles lurking online, third parties using your private data, hacking and even identity theft (op. cit., p. 212). Plenty of them and yet the ONS provider would not wish for draconian privacy settings to be encouraged as advertisers who generate profit and income for providers want large audiences. There is research out there and to distil from a distillation in this paper it seems that privacy concerns are driven by two concerns. One is disclosure (as in ‘look where I’ve been’ or ‘see what I’m doing’) and the other is control (as in ‘I’m calling the shots here’) and they reflect different kinds of people. The former are those with a high need for popularity whereas need for control is related to trust and self-esteem (Christofides , Muise, & Desmarais, 2009). In addition neophytes to the business of Facebooking will use social learning and social comparison to establish the norms of this new game.
A balanced vision of social media with the advantages and disadvantages was adopted by O’Keeffe , Clarke-Pearson, and Council on Communications and Media (2011). Their focus was on children within families and the advantages were 19 : Civic engagement and facilitation on social media; similar encouragement of artistic and musical activities; creative ideas generated from blogs and social interaction within social media; diversity of participants and content in social media; respect and self-esteem generated from one’s online identity. So going on social media can enhance participation and perceptions of people in the wider community at different levels and also provide participants with enhanced status. But these can also work in the other direction where for example exclusion rather than participation occurs and welcoming diversity can easily become excluding and abusing those who are different. Cyberbullying, ‘sexting’, and privacy issues are socially recognisable labels for some of these negative consequences. I liked this analysis simply because of the symmetry of the ‘bad’ and ‘good’ consequences that can flow from such a simple vision of a large and mixed group of participants who can access sophisticated ways of representing themselves and a virtually unlimited pool of information and then allowing them to get on with it with the positive and negative excesses being predictable.