Streaming Platforms, Filter Bubbles, and Cultural Inequalities. How Online Services Increase Consumption Diversity

Do digital technologies affect diversity in cultural tastes? Digital sociologists have warned of “filter bubbles,” attributed to shifts in the way culture is accessed online, and of persisting digital inequalities, while sociologists of culture have shown that diversity in consumption is valued as a marker of upper-middle-class status. Few empirical studies have connected these findings. We estimate the effect of using streaming platforms on the diversity of cultural consumption using survey data from France. We apply template matching to adjust for six sets of confounders. We find a significant, positive effect of using streaming platforms on the diversity of cultural consumption, measured by the number of cultural genres declared to be consumed, across three domains (music, movies, and TV shows) as well as on cosmopolitanism, measured by the propensity to watch movies and TV shows in a foreign language. The magnitude of this effect is relatively low for music(0.1 sd, 0.2 genres), intermediate for movies (0.2 sd, 0.6 genres), but high for TV shows (0.46 sd, 1.2 genres). The study brings new evidence against the filter bubble thesis; it shows that platforms do reinforce cultural inequalities by increasing the gap in consumption diversity between the working classes and the elite. It further suggests that the effect of technology on cultural consumption might be mainly mediated through its impact on cultural markets rather than changes in cultural experience.