Culture, Networks, Twitter and foursquare: Testing a Model of Cultural Conversion with Social Media Data

Abstract

Social network research often takes the view that networks chiefly influence the spread of culture, with few reciprocal effects. While some network scholars have implied a coevolutionary relationship between the two, cultural sociologists have provided increasingly convincing evidence that it is in fact cultural preferences which mediate network structure, rather than the other way around. In the present work, we attempt to validate one such model of the conversion of cultural capital to network position. We use Twitter data to extract the ego networks of individuals and foursquare check-ins to understand their cultural preferences. Our results are indicative of the importance of considering sociological models in which culture influences network structure.