Does culture affect the stories fans love? And do the stories fans love affect culture?

In 1994, MTV’s Real World: San Francisco featured Pedro Zamora, the first openly gay, HIV-positive man on television. The show documented Pedro’s journey as an AIDS educator and his commitment ceremony to his partner. This was one of many firsts from the show; audiences had never seen anything quite like this before, and Pedro’s story is still considered a pivotal moment in television and pop culture history.

Real World: San Francisco generated enormous attention and opened the doors for LGBT issues and AIDS in media. It also pioneered a new format and genre of television, reality, which still reverberates through culture today.

TV and film play a tremendous role in how we think about aspects of culture such as race, war, drugs, and sex. But understanding the relationship between these stories and culture has always been difficult. For example, was Pedro’s story on Real World a catalyst for change? Or was it the result of previous years’ events (e.g. Philadelphia in ‘93 and Magic Johnson announcing his HIV diagnosis in ’91)?

What’s behind this exploration?

Our analysis looks to identify the relationship between the stories fans love and culture. For example, we hypothesized that the Apollo lunar landings in 1969-1972 would incite an immediate explosion of "space-themed" films (it didn't). We also wondered whether media representation of Islam has grown with terrorism fears, war, and political unrest in the Middle East (it has).

For answers, we looked at plot and descriptive keyword data from the last 50 years of TV and film, grouping them into themes to identify shifts in media representation of culture. For example, our "tobacco" theme includes commonly associated keywords such as "cigarettes," "cigars," and "smoking.” To incorporate fans into our study, we concentrated on the stories from the top grossing films and top viewed TV shows from each year. While we encountered some limitations (e.g., the dataset uses crowdsourced tagging, TV keywords can sometimes be limited, and overall tagging appears to decline starting in 2013), we were interested in what general trends the data highlights.