The techno-social reproduction of taste boundaries on digital platforms: The case of music on YouTube

Highlights

• I study cultural boundaries in the circulation and consumption of music on YouTube.

• I analyse networks of relations among 14,865 music videos and 202,509 users.

• Both users and algorithms practically reproduce music classifications.

• I discuss techno-social feedback loops in platformized cultural reception.

Abstract

Recent research argues that digital platforms contribute to the long-lasting erosion of genre boundaries and established cultural classifications in the “heads and habits” of art consumers (DiMaggio 1987). This paper draws on large volumes of YouTube data to illustrate how, on the contrary, cultural boundaries are techno-socially reproduced online, shedding light on the understudied role of algorithmic systems in the classification of cultural goods.

Through a ground-up investigation of how both automated recommendations and the taste patterns of 202,509 platform users segment 14,865 music videos, this work provides empirical evidence of the persistent relevance of categorical boundaries in platformized cultural reception. The recommender system used by YouTube largely relates music videos of the same genre, thus reinforcing pre-existing artistic classifications in the digital circulation of culture. The study also documents how most users do not cross categorical borders in their interactions with musical content, and that boundary strength varies across music genres. I discuss how the interplay between the social patterning of taste and the algorithmic filtering of cultural content generates techno-social feedback loops, and conclude by drawing broad implications for the sociological study of culture and consumption.

Introduction

“When Frank Zappa's compositions are performed or recorded by symphony orchestras […], can boundaries be more in question?” (DiMaggio 1987:452)

Categorical boundaries powerfully shape all domains of social life, while being “ordinarily invisible” (Bowker and Star 1999:2). Boundary processes are particularly central within cultural fields, traditionally portrayed as crossed by socially-constructed cultural boundaries separating different genres of products and practices – e.g., “fine” and “popular” art –, as well as distinct, socially stratified categories of people – e.g., “highbrow” and “lowbrow” consumers (Pachucki, Pendergrass and Lamont 2007; DiMaggio 1987; Bourdieu 1984; Gans 1966).

In the past two decades, the global diffusion of online media and digital platforms has bolstered the idea that such cultural boundaries are more in question now than ever (see Silver, Lee and Childress 2016), especially in the “heads and habits” (DiMaggio 1987:441) of contemporary digital consumers. The cultural boundaries organizing artistic consumption started to erode in Western countries during the second half of the 20^th Century, undergoing a process of “declassification” (Janssen, Verboord and Kuipers 2011; DiMaggio 1987). According to several authors, Internet-based technologies further accelerate the declassification of cultural consumption. Digital connectivity weakens social and geographical boundaries – for instance, by allowing individuals to find romantic partners outside of traditional social circles (Rosenfeld and Thomas 2012). The widespread digitalization of cultural reception is believed to have a similar emancipatory impact on consumers’ tastes, due to the unprecedented variety of cultural content ubiquitously accessible online, at low or no cost (Webster 2019; Tepper and Hargittai 2009; Valtysson 2010). Recent contributions have argued that digital consumption practices span and re-negotiate established cultural boundaries between aesthetic forms and genres, across a variety of consumption realms (Beer 2013b; Verboord 2019; 2014; Walmsley 2016; Hanrahan 2018; 2013; Rimmer 2012). Based on this literature, we would expect digitally-mediated cultural consumption patterns to be largely individualized and “liquid” – as suggested, for instance, by Bauman (2011) – rather than segmented and hierarchized by strong taste boundaries, as in pre-digital times (Bourdieu 1984; Gans 1966). However, this view fails to fully consider how the rampant “platformization” of cultural fields not only lowers barriers to the circulation of cultural products, but also entails an unprecedented technological structuration of consumption patterns and classification systems via metrics and algorithmic systems (Nieborg and Poell 2018). Critical research on digital media and “filter bubbles” (Pariser 2011) suggests that platforms may produce a reinforcement, rather than an erosion, of pre-digital social and cultural boundaries (Fourcade and Johns 2020; Noble 2018; Hallinan and Striphas 2016).

Despite the many calls to investigate the multifaceted impact of Internet infrastructures on cultural reception (e.g. DiMaggio et al. 2001:325; Lamont 2012:215; Webster 2019:4), and the current centrality of algorithmic systems in the shaping of cultural circulation (Morris 2015; Beer 2013a; Prey 2018; Hallinan and Striphas 2016), the technological “affordances” of online platforms (Baym and boyd 2012) are only tangentially taken into consideration by empirical research on consumers’ tastes and classifications (Mihelj, Leguina and Downey 2019). This implies that the platform-based processes through which “similarities are perceived and genres enacted” (DiMaggio 1987:441) remain largely obscure.

Bridging literature in cultural sociology, media research, critical algorithm studies and computer science, this paper a) conceptualizes the notion of taste boundary and b) investigates digital taste-boundary making relationally and from the ground up, based on large amounts of data extracted from the most used music service worldwide – that is, video-sharing platform YouTube (IFPI 2016; YouTube 2020). This methodological strategy aims to overcome long-lasting limitations in cultural consumption research, linked to the widespread reliance on close-ended survey questions about genre preferences (Vlegels and Lievens 2017; Atkinson 2011; Rimmer 2012).

Does the digital mediation of cultural reception contribute to long-lasting processes of declassification, as the literature generally assumes? The present work indicates that this is not the case. By mapping music consumption patterns on YouTube through network analysis techniques, I show that they are structured along taste boundaries which tend to overlap genre categories. Moreover, I provide first empirical evidence on how platform-based algorithmic systems can reinforce cultural boundaries, rather than weakening them. These findings radically question our current understandings of the impact of digital media on cultural reception, giving a stronger empirical basis to critical perspectives on platforms and automated technologies.

The observed salience of cultural boundaries in digital consumption will be interpreted as the joint consequence of two interrelated phenomena: the enduring social patterning of taste, and the algorithmic circulation of cultural content on digital platforms. In the conclusion, I discuss how these two sets of mechanisms produce a feedback loop, which ultimately results in the techno-social reproduction of taste boundaries.