Cultural forms don't die so much as they dimish and decay

Oleg Sobchuk, The (slow) dying of cultural forms, Medium, Feb 26, 2019.

The set-up:

Several years ago, sipping coffee at the sunny campus of Stanford, J.D. Porter, from the Literary Lab, and I were discussing cultural evolution. I tried to persuade J.D. that thinking of cultural items as “species”, which evolve, mutate, and get extinct, is a useful metaphor — or even more than just a metaphor. But J.D. was skeptical. Cultural items, he said — for example, poems — rarely die. Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet around 1591, and yet, this play is still alive and kicking: maybe even more alive than during the times of Shakespeare. So how can we speak of “cultural selection” and “evolution” if cultural “species” — at least some of them — refuse to die?

Then we have some evidence and discussion leading to a distinction:

In biology, death is a qualitative change: there is a huge difference between a living and a dead organism. But in culture… death is quantitative. So: cultural death isn’t like crossing a border, it rather resembles a slow process of collapsing. And some cultural forms (or, according to Kelly, most of them) never fully collapse: they simply become infinitely closer to death, without ever reaching that final destination point. Shakespeare, as a cultural character, having reached his peak popularity almost a century ago, is slowly decaying from our cultural memory (Figure 3). Yes, his plays aren’t dead, but they are in the process of dying — for sure.

The slow dying of cultural forms… It may be worth studying further.