The New Tribalism

You are now entering the Palaeodigital...

Umbilically attached to our smartphones and tablets, 'oversharing' and posting selfies on social media, constantly checking our 'feeds' for 'likes' and 'retweets'... Most pundits see all this as new and unprecedented, even unnatural.

But anthropologist Kate Fox sees an emerging revival of very ancient patterns. In her new book, she argues that we are using Digital Age technology to recreate Stone Age social dynamics. Smartphones, social media, cyber-dating, gaming, etc. are all part of our latest unconscious attempt to reproduce the social essence of the environment in which we evolved, the Palaeolithic.

We are not suddenly becoming addicted to gadgets and screens. The internet is not turning us into shallow, selfish narcissists. What we are doing is a form of 'counteractive niche construction' - using technology to try to recreate our evolutionary comfort zone, the kind of social world our brains are wired for. This is nothing new; we've been trying for 10,000 years, since the Neolithic, with partial and varied success. This time, we have better tools. Could this be the dawn of the Palaeodigital?