Figure 1.

Measurement of the cultural landscape and methods of classification of values, behaviours, preferences and interests on Facebook. Panel (a) illustrates how the bottom-up quantitative study of culture is enabled by information technology advances and the broad measurement of humans across the globe. Paradigm shifting technologies such as the Internet, the advent of social media and big data, the introduction of the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart cities all shape the availability of information with which to measure previously unstudied dimensions of culture. We anticipate a hypothetical future in which traditional top-down concepts of culture are encompassed by and integrated into a bottom-up approach to the measurement of culture. Panel (b) illustrates how Facebook classifies users’ interests via users’ self-reporting, via users’ observed behaviour which includes the totality of users’ clicks on the platform and on ads served elsewhere by the platform, via users’ ‘likes’ and software downloads, and via broad inference based on users’ overall behaviour on and off the platform. The interests Facebook infers span hundreds of thousands of dimensions and include topics that both fall within more traditional measures of culture—such as religion, politics and the arts—as well as those that tend to fall outside of traditional measures—such as interests in video games, physical activity preferences and recreational drug interests.