ABSTRACT
While industrial society has continued to expand in the 21st century, it has been complemented by, and enmeshed with, a more rapidly expanding digital world. Around the turn of the millennium, mobile phones, the internet, and the Web became widely dispersed, and as often occurs in industrial society, opportunities for some quickly became necessities for all (Smith 1776). Although not everyone around the world was readily connected online, cybercafés were founded in most urban areas within a few years and most people got a mobile phone. A range of online social foci was created where people could establish and maintain social contacts (most of these contacts were still geographically close, though), belong to groups, express themselves, access music and information, shop, and build a reputation—or lose it. Online record keeping based on consumer reviews established sellers’ reputations that made billions of transactions possible between people who had never met (Diekmann et al. 2014). 1 In this new social ecosystem, the same cultural evolutionary patterns unfolded as before, but at a higher speed, with far more new information in a day and therefore scarcer attention for anything in particular (Lorenz-Spreen et al. 2019). In the words of Bellah (2011, p. 602):”Our rate of adaptation increased so greatly that we [were] having difficulty adapting to our adaptations”.
