Quantitative Analysis of Cultural Dynamics Seen from an Event-based Social Network

Abstract

Culture is a collection of connected and potentially interactive patterns that characterize a social group or a passed-on idea that people acquire as members of society. While offline activities can provide a better picture of the geographical association of cultural traits than online activities, gathering such data on a large scale has been challenging. Here, we use multi-decade longitudinal records of cultural events from Meetup.com, the largest event-based social networking service, to examine the landscape of offline cultural events. We analyze the temporal and categorical event dynamics driven by cultural diversity using over 2 million event logs collected over 17 years in 90 countries. Our results show that the national economic status explains 44.6 percent of the variance in total event count, while cultural characteristics such as individualism and long-term orientation explain 32.8 percent of the variance in topic categories. Furthermore, our analysis using hierarchical clustering reveals cultural proximity between the topics of socio-cultural activities (e.g., politics, leisure, health, technology). We expect that this work provides a landscape of social and cultural activities across the world, which allows us to better understand their dynamical patterns as well as their associations with cultural characteristics.