Evolutionary Dynamics of Cultural Memes and Application to Massive Movie Data

TL;DR

This paper develops a framework for analyzing cultural evolution at the meme level and applies it to large-scale movie data to trace genre evolution, identify influential movies, and compare impact assessments.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed evolutionary model for cultural memes and applies it to cinema data to reveal genre dynamics and influential movies over time.

Findings

Constructed a timeline of cinema genre evolution.

Identified movies that served as origins for popular memes.

Measured correlation between movie impact and expert/public assessments.

Abstract

The profound impact of Darwin's theory of evolution on biology has led to the acceptance of the theory in many complex systems that lie well beyond its original domain. Culture is one example that also exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties: Differential adoption of cultural variants (variation and selection), new entities imitating older ones (inheritance), and convergence toward the most suitable state (adaptation). In this work we present a framework for capturing the details of the evolutionary dynamics in cultural systems on the "meme"- the cultural analog of the biological gene-level, and analyze large-scale, comprehensive movie-meme association data to construct a timeline of the history of cinema via the evolution of genres and the rise and fall of prominent sub-genres. We also identify the impactful movies that were harbingers to popular memes that we may say correspond to the proverbial "Eve" of the human race, shining light on the process by which certain genres form and grow. Finally, we measure how the impact of movies correlates with the experts' and the public's assessment.