The digital logics of distinction: A field analysis of popular music on YouTube

• In Event: 1448 - Popular Culture: Fields of Cultural Production

Abstract

Recent literature in sociology and media studies argues that digital media contribute to the disruption of cultural hierarchies and transformation of aesthetic evaluations (e.g. Verboord, 2014; Hanrahan, 2013). On the contrary, the present study – combining large volumes of digital data extracted from a sample of 17,734 YouTube music videos and survey data collected through an ad hoc research design – shows that a Bourdieusian logic of distinction is in play in the digital field of popular music consumption, in the case of contemporary Italy. Mixing text mining techniques, qualitative content analysis, network and multiple correspondence analyses, this investigation sheds light on the forms of symbolic violence and hierarchies of legitimacy characterizing Italian YouTube commenters’ taste judgments, also exploring the social roots of distinctive position-takings. By developing a “digital field analysis” that exploits the traceability and granularity of public digital data, the present work deals with key methodological challenges in sociology of taste and consumption, aiming to contribute to the ground-up and relational understanding of cultural distinction processes in an increasingly “platformized” cultural world (Nieborg & Poell, 2018).

Author

• Massimo Airoldi