Alexander, Victoria D.; Blank, Grant and Hale, Scott A.. 2018. Digital Traces of Distinction? Popular Orientation and User-Engagement with Status Hierarchies in TripAdvisor Reviews of Cultural Organizations. New Media & Society, 20(11), pp. 4218-4236. ISSN 1461-4448 [Article]

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Abstract or Description

Cultural organizations are categorized by cultural products (high or popular culture) and by organizational form (nonprofit or commercial). In sociology, these classifications are understood predominantly through a Bourdieusian lens, which links cultural consumption to habitus and a class-based struggle for distinction. However, people’s engagement with institutionalized cultural classifications may be expressed differently on the Internet, where a culture of hierarchy-free equality is (sometimes) idealized. Using digital trace data from a representative sample of 280 user-generated reviews of four London cultural organizations, we find that reviewers are concerned with practical issues over cultural content, displaying a popular orientation to cultural consumption (an “audience-focus” or an “embodied” approach). A very small minority of reviewers claim status honor on a variety of bases, including symbolic mastery of traditional cultural capital. Overall, we find an online space in the cultural sphere in which cultural hierarchies are not relevant.

Item Type:	Article
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769448
Additional Information:	The authors are grateful for funding from the “Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities” grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/L009854/1), which enabled the data collection and extraction.
Keywords:	Cultural organization, cultural hierarchy, distinction, TripAdvisor, consumer reviews, Internet
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship (ICCE)
Dates:	Date Event 16 March 2018 Accepted 26 April 2018 Published Online 1 November 2018 Published
Item ID:	23054
Date Deposited:	19 Mar 2018 12:40
Last Modified:	12 Jun 2021 00:51
Peer Reviewed:	Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/23054

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