Social Media as Windows on the Social Life of the Mind

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 evolu-tion and understanding collective cognition. Under the first heading, I discuss some difficulties with the usual, adapta-tionist explanations of cultural phenomena, alternative expla-nations involving network diffusion effects, and some ways these could be tested using social-media data. Under the sec-ond 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. Let me begin by considering two1 senses in which we might speak of human thought as being “social”, and how they might orient the study of social information processin