Will Social Media Destroy Christmas Traditions?

During the festive season, people observe many traditions. These may differ from place to place, community to community, and time to time, but their presence gives pause to reflect on their functions and to think about whether social media impacts their observance.

At least in the media, the general consensus is that Christmas traditions are dying out.¹ Of course, suggesting Christmas traditions are dying out is, itself, something of a tradition in the media.² However, in this rapidly changing digital age, one question that comes to mind is whether any such traditions will persist for long.

Although Christmas traditions are a distinctly human affair, some answers may be found in the study of animal behaviour and evolutionary theory.

A recent media report suggested that, at least in the U.K., traditions long-honored are now distinctly less popular than they were. People were asked which traditions they observed a quarter of a century ago that they still observe now:

“Out of 22 long-established festive traditions…just one tradition—watching Christmas films—has increased in popularity….”¹

Of course, this survey did not ask whether any new traditions emerged to replace the dwindled ones over that period. Traditions are not set in stone, and they do alter, slowly, as society alters—and there are very good reasons why that must be the case.

It could be that there are new digitally-inspired Christmas traditions.

The word "tradition" derives from both Latin and old French and emerged in the 13th and 14th centuries to describe "things handed down"—usually related to religious laws from the Bible's Old Testament. In contemporary psychological terms, a relatively stable set of behaviours becomes a "tradition" when learned from others; that is, a tradition requires social learning.

These tradition-behaviours are passed to other individuals who had not previously performed them before witnessing others observing that tradition. Only a very few people decorate trees with shiny baubles at random, without social bidding, only for themselves, and get any reinforcement from it. This is a socially-learned behaviour, or a tradition, for a particular set of circumstances. Thus, there is a distinct and necessary social element to a tradition³.

It is this need for the presence of a social group that provokes the learning that suggests social media may well have an impact on traditions—and not just in changing them, but perhaps in removing them. Some will believe that the absence of such old-fashioned traditions would be a good thing. Still, a distinct possibility is that removing traditions (en masse) could damage society.

Traditions are essential means through which species survive. They allow adaptive behaviours to be transmitted without everybody having to learn them for themselves. It is better if not all members of a species have to learn for themselves that a certain plant is toxic. OK, so Christmas tree decorating behavior may not be adaptive, but the social cohesion and bonding it facilitates may well be.⁴ Getting social reinforcement from observing this trivial tradition reinforces the idea of social learning. It makes following social conventions more likely to occur under future circumstances when it is more important.

This sort of social transmission requires stability in society. That there is a grouping of trusted familiars to learn from. In fact, other species only appear to display social learning when their social environment is stable.

In one study, the foods chosen by rats, who were moved between cages each day so that they never had the same cage mates and never had a stable social group, did not depend on the food preferences of the other rats.⁵ Social learning and, hence, tradition requires a stable society.^5,6 Those traditions, in turn, help ensure a bonded and more stable society in which social learning can occur⁴.

Social media negatively impacts these conditions for social learning and, hence, cannot be regarded as a medium that will facilitate long-term tradition—even its own. The digital world is inherently unstable. The former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, has said:

“The internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”

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This statement is basically correct in that there is no plan in a digital community, no goal other than for the company to make money. The structure of the digital world is in constant flux, which mitigates the formation of societies⁷. The only constant in the digital world is change. Heraclitus may have welcomed this as a validation of his view, but it is not helpful for the maintenance of tradition.

The degree to which social learning can be useful is bounded not only by a society's stability but also by the number of people who social-learn. Too many social learners are ultimately bad for society.

While individuals who can learn from others have an advantage, this is only true if those others know what they are doing. The more people learn just from others and not from the consequences of their own actions, the less reliable the information gained from others becomes.

For reliable information to spread, there must be a set of people who test the world and learn about reality first-hand:

“As the frequency of social learners increases…the value of using social information would decline, because the proportion of individuals demonstrating accurate personal information would decrease.”⁶

Thus, those few who go their own way and find out for themselves serve a critical function for the group. So take heart: those who steadfastly refuse the tree, the dissenter performs a vital societal role.

While traditions can allow knowledge transmission, this is only if their value is tested against the world by some brave people. The effect of being reliant, in entirety, on the views and opinions expressed on social media takes away not only from individual learning but also from the value of social learning. The more people who rely on this social medium for information (which is all about opinion⁸), instead of relying on themselves, the poorer and more unreliable will become that learning.

Social media, being digital and not the real world, is not conducive to social learning, as it does not easily allow reality testing—think of the echo chamber⁹ —hence, it is not set up to sustain any particular tradition nor their existence in the abstract.

All in all, if Christmas traditions need social learning to persist, their future is not assured in a digital world. In itself, this is not hugely challenging, and some would argue that this is a good thing. However, moving away from Christmas traditions, if all traditions disappear, a critical building block of social cohesion disappears, mitigating social learning and taking away a weapon from the species' arsenal of adaptive change.