Sociological research on culture has long conceptualized categorical differentiation in terms of relational “distances” and relied on network imagery to describe the structural properties of fields of cultural production and consumption. Partly constrained by research design, extant research on relational similarity often focuses on either one-mode social networks, or two-mode cultural affiliation networks independently. Only a few recent empirical studies have considered the multiplex interaction between affiliations to cultural artifacts or categories and social relations embedding audience members within a system of dependence relations. We extend the notion of relational similarity to consider the interplay of cultural preferences and social ties and explore how distances between cultural genres are shaped by the mutually constitutive relation linking individual preferences and social networks. Analyzing a large online network of users (N = 43,549) and their expressed music preferences, we show that considering preferences alone results in two genre clusters separated by crisp boundaries. Considering both preferences as well as social network ties yields a sparse, connected component where the boundaries of genre categories become blurred. The study provides evidence that the structure of the space spanned by musical genres varies considerably once the connectivity properties of tastes and ties are jointly considered. This happens because social connections expose individuals to a set of potential future preferences that is typically broader than the set containing their current personal tastes. We discuss the qualitative implications of this result and its significance for future research on the duality of cultural tastes and social ties.

中文翻译：

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品味和纽带的双重聚集：在文化领域中扩展关系相似性的概念

长期以来，关于文化的社会学研究一直根据关系“距离”概念化分类分化，并依靠网络意象来描述文化生产和消费领域的结构特性。部分受到研究设计的制约，现存的关于关系相似性的研究通常独立地集中在单模式社交网络或双模式文化归属网络上。只有少数最近的实证研究考虑了与文化制品或类别的隶属关系与将观众嵌入依赖关系系统中的社会关系之间的多重互动。我们扩展了关系相似性的概念，以考虑文化偏好和社会关系的相互作用，并探索文化流派之间的距离是如何被连接个人偏好和社会网络的相互构成关系所塑造的。通过分析大型在线用户网络 （N = 43,549） 及其表达的音乐偏好，我们表明，仅考虑偏好会导致两个流派集群被清晰的边界隔开。同时考虑偏好和社交网络联系会产生一个稀疏的、相互关联的组件，其中流派类别的界限变得模糊。该研究提供了证据，一旦共同考虑品味和纽带的连通性，音乐流派所跨越的空间结构就会发生很大变化。发生这种情况是因为社会关系使个人接触到一组潜在的未来偏好，这些偏好通常比包含他们当前个人品味的集合更广泛。我们讨论了这一结果的定性意义及其对未来文化品味和社会关系二元性研究的意义。