Predictable Drifts in Collective Cultural Attention: Evidence from Nation-Level Library Takeout Data

TL;DR

This study analyzes five years of nationwide library loan data to understand how collective cultural attention shifts over time, revealing consistent drift patterns and influencing factors that impact prediction models.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale empirical evidence of continual cultural drift at the nation level and examines demographic influences on these shifts.

Findings

Culture drifts continually month-to-month at a near-constant rate.

Divergence in popularity distributions increases over time.

Drift varies significantly across different book genres.

Abstract

Predicting changes in consumer attention for cultural products, such as books, movies, and songs, is notoriously difficult. Past research suggests intrinsic limits for predicting consumer attention towards individual products. However, little is known about the limits for predicting shifts in collective attention. Here, we analyze five years of nationwide library loan data for almost 3 million individuals, comprising over 136 million loans of more than 750,000 unique titles. We find that culture, as measured by popularity distributions of loaned books, drifts continually from month to month at a near-constant rate, leading to a growing divergence over time, and that drift varies between book genres. By linking book loans to registry data, we investigate the influence of age, sex, educational level, and residential area type on cultural drift, finding heterogeneous effects. Our findings have important implications for market forecasting and algorithmic recommender systems, highlighting the need to account for drift dynamics.