Digital Traces of Distinction? Popular Orientation and User-Engagement with Status Hierarchies in TripAdvisor Reviews of Cultural Organizations

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]

[img]
Preview
Text
TripAdvisor_Qualitative_NMS_FinalTypescript_180320.pdf - Accepted Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial.

Download (279kB) | Preview

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:

DateEvent
16 March 2018Accepted
26 April 2018Published Online
1 November 2018Published

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

View statistics for this item...

Edit Record Edit Record (login required)