The Birth and Death of Cultural Things: Theory and Methods for Macro-cultural Change

• In Event: 4350 - Computational Sociology (Co-sponsored with Mathematical Sociology)

Abstract

Cultural evolution provides a unifying theory of cultural change in many social sciences. Yet it remains conspicuously absent from contemporary sociology. In this paper, we argue that we can gain novel insight into how and why public cultures (e.g. music genres) change over time by analyzing the populations of “cultural things” that constitute them (e.g., ensembles and albums), instead of the population of actors that construct them. Based on contemporary cultural evolution theory, we articulate how public cultures are transmitted, reproduced, and vary over time through the birth and death of cultural things. If cultural populations truly evolve, it follows naturally that common evolutionary processes like competition or age-dependent extinction could be shaping their trajectories. Cultural evolution provides alternative mechanisms of macro-cultural change beyond the individual actions, social movements, or exogenous shocks endorsed by most contemporary sociological theories.

We illustrate and operationalize this approach using machine-learning methods from macro-evolutionary biology to identify major shifts in the birth and death rates of Metal bands born between 1968 and 2000. We then introduce several more restricted models to test explicit hypotheses about the driving forces behind these shifts. We ultimately conclude that the growth of the genre is driven largely by contrasting processes of “sonic niche” creation, and subsequent competition for those niches. The availability of online population-size cultural datasets has created an urgent need for new theory and methods to interpret this data. The approach developed here could provide insight into the histories of other cultural categories like organizations, religions, scientific ideas, consumer products, or fashions.

Authors

• Bernard Koch, University of California, Los Angeles

• Daniele Silvestro, University of Gothenburg

• Jacob Gates Foster, University of California-Los Angeles