Title: Social Innovation and the Evolution of Creative, Sustainable Worldviews,
Abstract: The ideas that we forge creatively as individuals and groups build on one
another in a manner that is cumulative and adaptive, forming open-ended
lineages across space and time. Thus, human culture is believed to evolve. The
pervasiveness of cross-domain creativity--as when a song inspires a
painting--would appear indicative of discontinuities in cultural lineages.
However, if what evolves through culture is our worldviews--the webs of
thoughts, ideas, and attitudes that constitutes our way of seeing being in the
world--then the problem of discontinuities is solved. The state of a worldview
can be affected by information assimilated in one domain, and this
change-of-state can be expressed in another domain. In this view, the gesture,
narrative, or artifact that constitutes a specific creative act is not what is
evolving; it is merely the external manifestation of the state of an evolving
worldview. Like any evolutionary process, cultural evolution requires a balance
between novelty, via the generation of variation, and continuity, via the
preservation of variants that are adaptive. In cultural evolution, novelty is
generated through creativity, and continuity is provided by social learning
processes, e.g., imitation. Both the generative and imitative aspects of
cultural evolution are affected by social media. We discuss the trajectory from
social ideation to social innovation, focusing on the role of
self-organization, renewal, and perspective-taking at the individual and social
group level.