Knowingness and emerging cultural capital : the use of rankings and ratings among young people in cultural consumption

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Master Thesis

Knowingness and Emerging Cultural

Capital:

The Use of Rankings and Ratings among Young

People in Cultural Consumption

David Bazan Royuela (11794992) dbazanr@gmail.com

MSc Sociology: Cultural Sociology Track University of Amsterdam

Supervisor: Prof Dr Olav Velthuis Second supervisor: Prof Dr Giselinde Kuipers

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Dedicada als meus pares i especialment a la Toñi,

la persona més important del món.

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Summary:

The Master Thesis Emerging Cultural Capital and Knowingness: The Use of Rankings

and Ratings among Young People in Cultural Consumption, explores the use of rankings

and rating among young individuals with higher education in their cultural consumption practices in the film field and culinary field. Cultural fields are increasingly mediated by the use of rankings and ratings. The uncertainty about the qualities of products and the current context of cultural abundance requires the deployment of elements to qualify and classify cultural items.

The use of rankings and ratings highlights the relevance of understanding the ways of engagement to cultural products; cultural distinction is not only anchored on ‘’what’’ people consume, but especially in ‘’how’’ they relate to cultural products. In this way, knowing the adequate ways of engagement is at the base of new forms of distinction.

The use of rankings and ratings entails a legitimate knowing way of engagement with cultural products. This mode is characterised by the self-reflexive capacity to select and filter information and be critical with what metrics represent. This mode implies ''doing research'' as the most legitimate way of using rankings and ratings. On the other hand, there is the rejection of other young individuals who draw symbolic boundaries over the inability of metrics to represent the intrinsic qualities of cultural products. This division serves to establish boundaries around emergent cultural capital and highbrow cultural capital. Finally, the opposition between professional critics and user-generated rankings and ratings is embedded in wider debates about cultural authority, legitimacy and symbolic value.

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1 Introduction:

During the last two decades, there has been an explosion in the use of rankings and ratings; their introduction has entailed the development of measures evaluating and classifying the practices and performances of individuals and organisations within an increasing range of different social domains (Espeland and Sauder, 2007). This trend has also been extended into how practices and activities are planned, assessed and undertaken in different cultural fields (Jeacle and Carter, 2011), where the emergence of rankings and ratings has allowed people to create, rate and share content actively, and to rely on the evaluations of other individuals and professional critics in the consumption of cultural products. Nowadays, for example, has become increasingly common to consult the ratings of a film before deciding to watch it or compare the ratings of different restaurants before choosing where to eat out. This transformation has contributed to new dynamics in the processes of opinion formation and how individuals relate with cultural products (Verboord, 2014). In this way, the use of rankings and ratings is among others related with the necessity to reduce uncertainty, and with the function as a trusted intermediary in a period characterised by the abundance of cultural products in western societies.

In this master thesis, I investigate the relationship between systems of rankings and ratings and contemporary reformulations of cultural capital (Prieur and Savage, 2013). The study of how lifestyles, cultural taste and consumption are structured by the socio-economic position of individuals has been a central topic of interest for sociology since its origins (Bourdieu, 1984). Nevertheless, cultural consumption and the underlying mechanisms producing distinction remain a contested topic of debate. I assume the position of some scholars advocating the necessity to understand cultural capital relationally, i.e. as a dynamic concept that changes in consonance with the changes over time in the system of relations within social space (Prieur and Savage, 2013). In this way, nowadays the capacity of being discerning in cultural practices and the centrality of knowing the appropriate ways of cultural participation are more important markers of cultural distinction than the mere consumption of certain ‘’highbrow’’ products (Prieur and Savage, 2013). This new axis of distinction is especially salient among younger cohorts, who are more prone to display ‘’emerging’’ forms of cultural capital, this change is produced because cultural practices and tastes are structured by age (Coulangeon, 2017; Friedman, Savage, Hanquinet, and Miles, 2015). What it is important is not merely the

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consumption of certain cultural products, but knowing how to display this knowledge, the forms of engagement and how to shift between different cultural references in the adequate situations.

The aim of the research is to understand how individuals use rankings and ratings to decide which cultural products are more legitimate. Our interest lies in analysing the relationship between rankings and ratings, cultural capital, distinction and social reproduction. We are not interested in understanding how cultural taste is socially structured or how certain cultural products and activities are more legitimate than others, but how the use of rankings and ratings might be an anchor to display new forms of cultural capital and achieve legitimacy through the right ways of knowing and experiencing cultural products. In other words, this is a research about the social class dimension of rankings and ratings. In order to guide the research and help us to answer our interests the following research question will guide the research project:

• Does the use of rankings and ratings by young urban middle-class individuals in

the choice of cultural products produces cultural distinction, and if so in what ways?

The study of the relationship between rankings, ratings and social class has generally addressed the implications of the introduction of rankings into the educational system and the effects on the reproduction of inequality. However, the relationship between rankings and ratings, cultural capital and consumption has remained mostly unexamined. This research could help to fill the gap in the literature about cultural capital, conceptualising how new forms of cultural capital relate with the use of rankings and ratings.

In a period where the ability to choose and navigate across different cultural genres is crucial, the role of rankings and ratings as a widespread medium to select cultural products might be at the base of mechanisms of cultural distinction. Especially, when the engagement of cultural consumption with digital technologies allows new forms of relation with cultural products that challenge traditional forms of evaluation. In this way, we can contribute to existing research claiming the importance of cultural class analysis to understand how social distinction and social inequality are being remade through new mechanisms in the 21st century (Savage, 2015).

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The research will be focused on the experiences of nineteen young individuals with higher education and a middle-class background who reside in London. We will focus on this segment of the population because existent research signals them as the group that tends to display more new configurations of cultural capital (Friedman et al., 2015; Savage, Hanquinet, Cunningham and Hellbrekke, 2018). Moreover, Jarness (2017) highlights how class groups are generally represented s homogeneous totalities, but it is within class fractions where frictions and divergences in each divide of the social ladder are more visible.1 This happens because as Holt (1997) asserts the ‘’dominant and dominated fractions in each class are delineated by a symbolic boundary based on cultural differences in tastes reflecting the centrality of their relationship to the epicentre of value in the class lifestyle’’ (p 336). The desire to be more different than those most similar to you accentuates cultural differences. Hence, understanding the difference in the discourses and the uses of rankings and ratings within this group will make more visible how distinction and new forms of cultural capital act in this domain.

The first part of the thesis will provide the theoretical foundations of our research. In it, we will present the context where rankings and ratings have emerged and the relevance of rankings and ratings as judgement devices following the work of Lucien Karpik. Furthermore, we will review the conceptual developments and debates around cultural capital, the ways of engagement in cultural consumption by young highly-educated individuals and we will present arguments about the role of reflexivity in structuring cultural consumption. In the following section, we will explain the methodology, the research design and the strategies and limitations in our sample. In the final parts of the thesis we will present the major findings of our research, and finally in the conclusion, we will reflect about the implications of rankings and ratings for new forms of cultural capital and the future lines of inquiry that this research opens.

1_{In fact, Jarness (2017) assures that the symbolic battles between the dominant and dominated poles of}

every class fraction are more intense than symbolic battles across the social ladder. This is produced by the desire to be more different than those most similar to you.

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2 Rankings and Ratings:

Nowadays, it is increasingly common to rely on systems of rankings and ratings as a source to obtain information before purchasing a product or carrying and activity. In front of the wide array of cultural choices available, we try to collect information in order to make the right choice (Wright, 2015). Planning a holiday, going to a restaurant or watching a movie often involve scrutinising the inherent characteristics of products or verifying how they are evaluated by other consumers or experts. We try to obtain as much information as possible because the value of these products is uncertain and incommensurable. Their appreciation depends on qualitative judgements, and therefore we use rankings and ratings trying to ascribe value to particular cultural products (Karpik, 2010). This uncertainty is intensified with the wider availability of cultural products. For example, with the expansion of the means of technology, the internet and video-on-demand systems, the availability of films have grown enormously. Only on Netflix, there are currently 5.130 titles available in the United Kingdom.2 This trend is also observable in other leisure and cultural domains such as restaurants or music (Verboord, 2014). For this reason, in order to manage and navigate uncertainty and the growing volume of available cultural objects, there is an architecture of statistical measures, indicators and reviews that increasingly take part in how people get information and select products in their purchasing decisions.

Advocates of scoring systems highlight the reliability and accuracy of metrics to rate and evaluate a wide range of activities and practices across different domains (Citron and Pasquale, 2014). The effect of the introduction of scoring measures is twofold. They serve as instruments ‘’in the internal management of organizations and in the external representations of their quality, efficiency, and accountability to the wider public’’ (Shore and Wright, 2015: 421). The underlying assumption behind their use is that they allow increasing predictability, coordination, and transparency with the objective of enhancing the evaluation of the performances of individuals, organizations or products (Espeland and Sauder, 2007). The introduction of these systems has transformed the way in which we think and represent a wide range of social activities, including the activities and practices within cultural fields.

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The development of scoring systems can be traced back to the increasing role of social statistics in the 19th century coinciding with the advent of industrialization, the political transformations of the epoch, and the migration flows from rural to urban areas (Hacking, 1991). A series of hierarchical categories and statistical measures were introduced in order to act upon individuals and population; calculative measures were devised as mechanisms to facilitate governability and increase the control over the habits of workers (Foucault 1997). Some of these measures included the introduction of the census, the development of medical statistics listing the causes of death or illness among workers3 or the application of timetables in the factory, thus creating workers familiarised with external regulations. In this way, the logic of formal or instrumental rationality became the most desired regulative principle in the development of modern social systems (Reed 1992).

Since the late 1970s, with the transition into post-industrial societies and service economies, there has been an intensification in the use of quantitative performance measures and systems of classification where vast amounts of information are collected with economic, commercial and organisational objectives (Beer, 2016). This trend has been devised as an impersonal form assessment over organisations and producers’ performances and capabilities, making at the same time information more available to the public (Espeland and Sauder, 2007). The introduction of quantification measures has witnessed the development of a classificatory architecture, ‘’that pulls in variegated ways of boxing and measuring people and things to some end’’ (Fourcade and Healy, 2017: 289).

Quantification measures have an increasingly significant presence in everyday life and their effects have also permeated the way people approach consumption (Beer, 2016). High metric scores are taken as an indication of the success and high quality of cultural products. This way of thought has affected how people appreciate cultural products. The creation of categories of thought is contingent on particular social environments that affect and constrain the way people cognitively interact with the world (Zerubavel, 2009). In this way, the diffusion of scoring measures has affected how we evaluate cultural products that by their intrinsic characteristics are incommensurable and can only be appreciated subjectively. The appreciation based on their intrinsic qualities has been challenged by a valuation based on their value in relation to the quantitative value of other

3_{The introduction of medical statistics was not only meant to develop an accountability to collect the causes}

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cultural products, independently of the differences that might make the products incomparable in any meaningful way (Wright, 2015). Therefore, rankings and ratings in certain degree are perceived as a fact, as a trustful and transparent representation of the value of a cultural product.

2.1 Judgement devices and uncertainty:

From a consumer perspective, the role of rankings and ratings is related with satisfying a necessity of information. When markets are topped by products defined and appreciated by their intrinsic qualities rather than simply by their price, it is necessary to use some guidance in order to compare and evaluate products. This allow consumers to make choices according to their expectations and preferences.

Lucien Karpik (2010) has developed the idea of ‘’Market for Singularities’’ to analyse what happens when the orthodox economic assumption about actors’ interactions in rational markets is challenged by the fact that markets in service economies have been increasingly permeated by singular products that cannot be compared and valued by their explicit characteristics. In ‘’singular markets’’ the idea that objective price information regulates transactions is not useful because the value of singular products is anchored on subjective criteria. For example, a singular product such as a restaurant cannot be evaluated until someone has eaten in there.

For Karpik, ‘’singularities are everyday goods and services that are unique, multidimensional, incommensurable and uncertain’’ (p12). The prevalence of singular products in contemporary markets has entailed the development of an apparatus of judgement devices in order to ‘’dissipate the opacity of the market, providing people information and knowledge about products’’ (2010: 44). The function of judgment devices is to provide knowledge about products and to guide consumers in their decisions. They have the ability to synthetize diverse and complex information into a manageable vocabulary that the average person can handle easily (Hakanen, 2002). Therefore, they serve to delegate the cognitive task of judgment in credible sources of knowledge (Karpik, 2010: p49). For this reason, the market for singularities is governed by the logic of the search for the “good” or the ‘’right’’ choice (Karpik, 2010). According to Karpik, the ensemble of judgement devices can be classified into five categories.

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Networks include all the interpersonal relations of a person and operate by ‘’circulation of spoken word’’ (p. 45). It is a strong source of credible information. Networks can be divided between the personal network based on close social relations, the practitioner network based on expert knowledge and the trade network based on the level of trust between a seller and a buyer in a transaction. Then there are appellations; they comprise labels, certifications or designations of origin that guarantee and ensure the specificity of a product. An example of Appellation is Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, which is regulated by protected designation of origin (PDO). Thus, the presence of an indication of PDO in the cheese label guarantees that the cheese has been produced in Italy4 according to the standards of a ‘’true’’ Parmigiano cheese. Cicerones form another type of judgement devices. They comprise the body of professional critics, experts, guides or publications in specialised journals that provide professional evaluations of products. Their reliability emanates from the symbolic authority associated with the expertise of cicerones in a given field. An example of cicerones would be the review of a film by a film critic or the Michelin Guide. Then we find rankings; they are hierarchical classifications ordering products based on their qualities. The hierarchical order depends on the criteria of the creator of the ranking. There are two types of rankings: professional rankings based on expert evaluations such as film festivals awards and buyers’ rankings governed by consumers’ criteria such as box-office hits or top-seller lists. Finally, confluences designate all marketing strategies created to appeal to consumers. For example, the opening of a fashion shop in the 5th Avenue in New York is not only a way of bringing a fashion collection to wider audiences, but also conveys the idea of being a top, exclusive fashion brand. The apparatus of judgment devices includes a heterogeneous body of different forms of evaluation where ‘’competition between products has been increasingly replaced by competition between judgment devices’’ (p 54). In this way, the use of one or another source of evaluation might not only provide different information about the same cultural products, but the use of specific judgment devices might indicate the different cultural expectations and cultural background of their users.

Cultural products are the prototypical example of singularities; they generally are not valued by their objective characteristics but by aesthetic and subjective qualities (Beckert, Rössel and Schenk, 2017). However, nowadays the use of rankings and ratings involves

4_{More precisely the producing areas comprise the provinces of Parma, Reggio Emilia, some areas of}

Bologna, Modena and some areas of Mantua. The production is regulated by the Consorzio del Formaggio

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the quantification of qualitative aesthetic products so that they can be evaluated and compared (Prince, 2014). For this reason, systems of rankings and ratings develop the role of cultural intermediaries structuring the consumption of cultural objects and practices.

When we apply Karpik’s framework to define systems of rankings and ratings in our study, we find that his definition of rankings is too narrow and does not summarise accurately the different types of information that systems of rankings and rating provide. Systems of rankings and rating generally entail the combination of different types of judgements5. Rankings and rating ‘’seem to escape existing descriptions of valuation devices. Thus, compared to the typology proposed by Karpik, these sites combine aspects of personal judgment devices (i.e., organizing people’s raw expressions) and features from impersonal devices (i.e., building a score and a unique ranking of restaurants)’’ (Mellet, Beauvisage, Beuscart and Trespeuch. 2014: 8). In the digital domain, consumer reviews combine rankings aggregating numerical evaluations of a product with written reviews that allow users to express their opinions based on their personal experiences. (Mellet, Beauvisage, Beuscart and Trespeuch, 2014). For example, on TripAdvisor we can find rankings elaborated by restaurant consumers based on the scores in four different categories: service, food, value, and atmosphere. However, this type of hierarchical judgement is often accompanied by qualitative reviews from the same consumers explaining their dining experience.

Research on marketing and consumption has labelled evaluations based on user-generated content as eWord-of-mouth (eWOM).6_{This type of evaluations represent a}

powerful network device that positively influences the behaviour of consumers (Cheung, Luo, Sia, and Chen. 2009). But eWOM evaluation are often aggregated and converted into rankings and ratings. Another combination of different types of devices are platforms providing expert evaluations of cultural products such as wine or films, which usually combine ordinal lists with qualitative reviews. The qualitative information

5_{The categories in his classification are not sufficiently exclusive and excluding. Even if one type}

judgement device dominates the type of evaluation that the device provides it is not always clear in what category a rating and rating fall. For example, a professional critic star-rating is a connoisseur a ranking or both?

6_{Another topic of debate is how user-generated sites create content. Some research has highlighted how}

despite the democratic dimension the vast majority of users adopt a passive position while only a small fraction of consumers creates and reviews products (Arenas-Márquez, Martínez-Torres and Toral, 20) In this way, this type of sites at some extent are reproducing

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complementing rankings takes the form of cicerone where an expert evaluates a product based on its symbolic and aesthetic qualities. This process also occurs the other way around, for example in traditional media such as newspapers, where cicerone devices such as professional critics reviews often involve ratings in the form of star-rating. Hence, we observe that systems of rankings and ratings combine different types of judgements, presenting a more complex picture of the tools used to reduce uncertainty. For this reason, in this research we will define as rankings and ratings any device containing a numerical or star rating summarising the qualities of a cultural product. Moreover, we will differentiate between rankings and ratings more numerical such as IMDB and connoisseurial rankings and ratings where reviews are accompanied with numerical measures or star-ratings.

2.2 Cultural abundance and the digital field:

Systems of rankings and ratings have become an important ‘‘cultural intermediary’’. A cultural intermediary is a significant figure in cultural fields responsible for ‘’the presentation and representation of symbolic goods and services’’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 359). Cultural intermediaries have an important role in shaping taste and aesthetic preferences because ‘‘they are implicated in constituting and circulating categories of legitimate culture and thus, possibly, in challenging and changing them’’7_{(Maguire, 2012: 7).}

The relevance of systems of rankings and ratings in the circulation of culture is intertwined with their role providing evaluations about products in order to navigate uncertainty, but also in helping to handle the increasing abundance of cultural products available. The growth in the volume of cultural products available in western societies has necessarily ‘’affected the ways in which cultural products are made, received and circulated’’ (Wright, 2011: 12). Since the 1970’s and 1980’s, there has been a general steady growth in the number of cultural products and the participation in cultural activities. Think of the increase in the number of arts festivals in Europe (Quinn, 2005), the number of museums and museum visitors (Johnson, 2003), tourism to heritage sites

7_{According to Smith Maguire (2014) when Bourdieu developed the notion of cultural intermediaries he}

had in mind the role developed by members of the petit bourgeois in the new economies in circulating cultural products. However, according to her, the mediation of cultural forms nowadays is not monopolised by member of the petit bourgeois. It is widely embedded in class relations. So, there exist multiple cultural intermediaries.

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(Richards, 1996) or the number of restaurants and eating out activities (Warde, 2015). For example, in the United States, the number of restaurants per capita grew by 61% from 1971 to 1997 (Rashad, Grossman, and Chou, 2005). Furthermore, with globalisation processes, the content of cultural products has become more diversified and includes a wide variety of cultural offerings. For example, the number of curry houses in the UK increased from around 1,000 restaurants in the early 1970s to 8,300 restaurants in the year 1998 (Jones and Ram, 2003). For this reason, the apparatus of judgement devices is envisioned to manage the difficulty of being presented with abundant and diverse forms of culture. These devices provide orientation to consumers through established cultural authorities or by trusted networks (Wright, 20015).

The intensification of cultural abundance is also related with the post-modern disposition of contemporary western societies, where active engagement and choices in consumption are central in marking lifestyles; what at the same time serve as a basis to establish symbolic boundaries between social groups8 (Holt, 1997). In this way, the emergence of new spaces characterised by leisure and cultural consumption promote the increasing volume of cultural products and practices. (Zukin, 1998).

A significant development related with cultural abundance is the increasing role of digital technologies in cultural consumption. The digital field allows handling high volumes of information. With the explosion of the Internet, more people increasingly use or are exposed to online information, evaluations and classifications of cultural products (Hennig-Thurau, Gwinner, Walsh and Gremler 2004). For example, digital technologies are a very important source of information for travellers when they have to search information and organise which activities and attraction to visit during their holidays (Litvin, Goldsmith and Pan, 2006). This importance is also observable in the film field, where the intensity of online word of mouth and expert reviews contributes exponentially to an increase in consumption among moviegoers (Kim, Park and Park, 2013). Online evaluations differ from other channels of information such as advertising in that they can provide positive but also negative perceptions of the cultural product (Chen and Xie, 2005).

Some research has also pointed to how new technologies are increasingly related with new (re)definitions of taste (Wright, 2015). There are cultural differences in the use of

8_{I am not suggesting that consumption is a conscious effort by individuals to actively construct their own}

identity. I simply want to highlight that consumption is central in the lifestyles of individuals in western societies, indistinctly of

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social media, where some users rely more on Twitter because they find it more intellectually driven than other platforms such as Facebook (Savage, 2015). Furthermore, digital technologies and algorithms are at the core of the development of systems of recommendation based on reviews, ratings and purchases from online platforms developed under the promise of facilitating the development of models for recommending cultural products. (Godoy-Lorite, Guimerà, Moore and Sales-Pardo, 2016). Hence, the digitalisation of cultural consumption is at the base of new forms of relating with cultural products.

Nevertheless, not all individuals access and use digital technologies in the same way. The Internet uses are structured along the lines of age, gender, income, education or social class (Van Deursen, Van Dijk and Peter, 2015). The concept of digital divide was initially coined to understand differences in terms of physical access; and although the gap in access has been more or less addressed in western societies, rather than a democratisation in its use, new divides in terms of uses and benefits have emerged (Van Deursen and Van Dijk, 2011). For example, individuals belonging to upper and middle classes tend to engage more on information-oriented activities that enhance status, such as using the email, looking for information about cultural activities or travelling, reading economic news, and use Google search-engine, while people from less privileged background tend to have a higher preference for social interaction (chat rooms, Facebook) and gaming. (Zillien and Hargittai, 2009; Van Deursen, Van Dijk and Peter, 2015).

According to Van Deursen and Van Dijk (2014), the main axis of the digital divide concerns uses and skills. In terms of skills, they identify operational skills, i.e. the basic skills required to operate Internet technology. Then, formal skills comprise the necessary competencies to navigate the hyper-connected structure of the internet. Content-related skills comprise information capabilities, i.e. the ability to seek information. Finally,

strategic skills are related with the attainment of goal-oriented solutions more efficiently

and optimally. In this way, the internet creates ‘’an even stronger division, (where) the higher status members increasingly gain access to more information than the lower status members’’ (Van Deursen and Van Dijk, 2014: 521).

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2.3 User-Generated Content:

The expansion of digital technologies has shifted how people use and access information. Nowadays, the systems of rankings and ratings more widely used can be classified in two groups; rankings and ratings based on user-generated content and rankings and ratings and based on professional critics. If traditionally people generally had access to content elaborated by a smaller group of expert producers, today people are increasingly accessing content produced by other users like them (Manovich, 2009). This demarks a change from the low capacity that audiences had before to shape content. Nowadays digital technology has enhanced the agency of consumers and the scope and reach of their activities (Jenkins, 2006). However, as Van Dijck (2009) highlights, the democratising capacity of user-generated content and extent of user agency is somehow limited. Firstly, because not all users participate actively in the production of content, the vast majority of them continue to assume a passive position towards digital media. Secondly, as platforms structure and influence how content circulates, they create constraints to channel information in accordance with their interests. For this reason, it is important to be aware that even if content ‘’is said to be ‘’user-generated’’ that does not mean that users have full control over what is produced and how it gets displayed’’. (Van Dijck, 2009: 51).

The corpus of user-generated content is formed by platforms that function as judgment devices such as TripAdvisor, IMDB or YouTube. These platforms are based on the contributions of ordinary amateur people and affect how people consume cultural products. They generally combine quantitative measures with qualitative comments from users evaluating products, thus providing information according to popular preferences. But more importantly, the content of user-generated sites relies more on a popular aesthetic judgement criterion instead than on highbrow art discourse more associated to professional critics’ evaluations (Verboord, 2014). For example, popular aesthetics tend to evaluate and discuss more the performance of actors while highbrow evaluations tend to focus more on the creative aspect of films, i.e. the director.

The underlying principle behind user-generated content is based on the fact that people trust more the opinions and advice of people similar to them when they have to choose products and activities. In this way, user-generated content becomes a powerful word of mouth channel (Dhar and Chang, 2007). This change has blurred the distinction between experts who evaluate cultural products based on institutionalised aesthetic criteria, and popular audiences. As a result, a less hierarchical system of creating symbolic value may

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have emerged (Jenkins, 2006). In this way, the emergence of user-generated sites places systems of rankings and ratings as relevant systems of popularity and power in the (re)production, challenge and transformation of cultural hierarchies (Harvey, Ringrose and Gill, 2013).

2. 4 Professional Critics

The other type of online rankings and ratings that people use as a source of information is based on professional critics. The evaluations of critics differ from consumer reviews in that critics’ evaluations tend to be more elaborated and concerned with the legitimate canons of the cultural field (Shrum, 1996). Professional critics try to maintain an impression of neutrality; they develop a more objective discourse talking about the context of a cultural object or the relation of the product with broader cultural debates within a given field (De Jong and Burgers, 2013). They generally tend to address an informed audience, acting as guarantors of the proper appreciation of cultural products (Wright, 2015).

In the digital field, professional criticism generally takes the form of qualitative written reviews such as blogs, articles or reviews in specialised web pages. However, some platforms have aggregated critics reviews turning them into metrics. Platforms like RottenTomatoes or Metacritic are clear examples of this trend. They provide the general professional consensus about a given product. Therefore, digital users can consult and compare different kinds of judgements depending on the focus of their concerns.

Despite the expansion of user-generated content and the emergence of a new evaluating discourse challenging the authority of critics’ monopoly in the cultural field; some research has proved how they keep having a prominent role influencing people’s choices. For example, Debenedetti and Ghariani (2018) show how film critics quotations in press advertisement in France are markers of legitimacy and act as predictors of movie success. Chakravarty, Liu and Mazumbar (2010) show how frequent moviegoers rely more on online films critics, while sporadic moviegoers are the ones who rely more on consumer reviews. More importantly, other research has demonstrated how critics react to changes in institutional context. They adapt their discourse while at the same time continue to be cultural authorities patrolling the boundaries of legitimacy in cultural fields (Glynn and Lounsbury, 2005). In the culinary field, food critics have adapted to

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transformations in food valuing. They have abandoned a highbrow logic as a result of changes in social spaces and have embraced new taste qualities in the form of openness and exoticism, while they have at the same time continued to establish the ‘’essential qualities of food necessary for it to serve as cultural capital and distinction’’ (Johnston and Baumann, 2007: 196).

The relationship between professional critics and consumer evaluations is more complex than simply the result of a decline and democratization of cultural hierarchies. Since the 18th century when critics became an independent profession, they have developed an essential role in the symbolic world (Featherstone, 2007). However, there is a gap in the literature examining how the use of systems rankings and ratings is related with new ways in which cultural distinction might (re)enacted.

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3 Cultural Capital:

The concept of cultural capital is one of the key contemporary contributions of sociology to the analysis of social inequality. It has provided researchers from various disciplines the conceptual tools to understand how the acquisition of knowledge and the dispositions that provide the frameworks to navigate social life serve as a basis to establish and reproduce social differences and hierarchize groups and persons.

In Distinction (1984), Pierre Bourdieu showed how tastes, lifestyles and knowledge are at the base of the establishment and reproduction of class boundaries. According to him, the inter-generational transmission of cultural experiences and aesthetic preferences is connected to legitimacy processes, where cultural hierarchies indicate the value of products and activities according to their position in symbolic space (Michael 2017). Cultural capital acts through the hierarchies that define the legitimacy of cultural objects and practices. Therefore, the individuals with legitimate knowledge can decode more adequately the dominant, institutionalised social meanings, achieving a privileged social position and reproducing in this way class relations.

The work of Bourdieu reminds how in order to understand processes which create inequality we do not have to focus exclusively on economic capital, but on the interplay between economic, cultural and social capital. However, when Bourdieu developed his work on cultural capital (1984), he did not specify how empirically to deploy the concept (Silva and Warde 2010). This lack of empirical clarity, in part, has provoked that the definition, logic and effect of cultural capital on people has been trapped in ongoing academic debates about the flaws and strengths of his work. A broader conceptualisation of cultural capital understands the concept in terms of ‘’inculcated familiarity and ease with abstract, valued modes of knowledge, that is, intelligence or culturedness’’ (Atkinson, 2010: 45). Furthermore, Bourdieu advised against the dangers of substantialism. For him, the best way to understand the interplay of social forces was relationally. Therefore, cultural capital has to be understood as a set of relational properties (Lizardo and Skiles, 2012).

Bourdieu’s work and the concept of cultural capital are very helpful to understand changes in the cultural domain and the articulation between social class, culture and inequality. In the next section, we are going to review how sociologists have used or

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challenged the effects and relevance of cultural capital, and some of the most important discussions around the concept.

3.1 Developments and challenges in the analysis of cultural capital:

The initial assumption which Bourdieu developed in Distinction (1984) asserted that upper and middle-class members have a greater disposition to appreciate highbrow cultural products given that they have the cultural competence to appreciate canonised cultural products and activities. However, for Bourdieu middle and upper classes did not represent a homogeneous totality, within these class fractions there are discrepancies and symbolic struggles. The dominant classes, especially those having more economic capital, were more inclined to display what he labelled as an ‘’hedonistic aesthetic’’,9 characterised by the search of a more luxurious taste and expensive style of consumption

10_{(1984: 172). On the other hand, some class fractions were more inclined towards a}

‘’pure aesthetic’’ based on the consumption of serious and austere leisure activities. Intellectuals and artists were the main representatives of this group, which was characterised by the pursuit of the purity of form in cultural consumption. Finally, in his model working classes had a greater inclination to prefer and enjoy popular culture. In this way, Bourdieu’s conceptual model was based in the homology (p 176) between the social space and the symbolic space, or space of lifestyles that served upper classes to reproduce their social advantage continually. Nevertheless, those groups which possessed more cultural capital, typically middle classes, were using their cultural expertise trying to compensate for their position, i.e. their lack of economic capital in comparison with wealthier groups, ensuring in this way social legitimacy (Bennet and Silva, 2006).

The relationship between cultural capital, lifestyles and taste as something socially structured has been the focus of continued academic discussions since its original publication11. An important critique came from theories of individualisation denying the

9_{The prototypical example of hedonistic aesthetic were wealthy industrialists}

10_{Distinction (1984) and the works of Bourdieu are constantly being reinterpreted by scholars, the scope}

of the research is not to enter into a discussion about the work of Bourdieu, but offer a perspective about his initial departure point to contextualise the current debates and trends about the concept

11_{This remark can be extended to the majority of Bourdieu’s work. Whom work does not leave anyone}

indifferent. I Agree with Warde that Bourdieu, even if with some weaknesses and gaps, developed the best conceptual tools until the moment to understand the relationship between the social and cultural.

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social dimension of taste and lifestyles. From the individualisation theory (Beck, 1992) or the reflexive project of the self (Giddens, 1991) to the self-construction of identity through consumption (Featherstone, 2007), all these theories commonly claim that individuals have ‘’freed’’ from social constraints and therefore, the strength of social class as a regulative precept has decreased as a source of identity. Individuals are living a mandatory project where the necessity to self-construct their identity drives them to engage in consumption practices and pursue certain lifestyles in order to reaffirm who they are. Theories of individualization ‘’reject Bourdieu’s vision of a tight integration between a single objective of domination, namely social class, a single scale of cultural legitimacy and a stable set of personal disposition internalized by social actors’’ (Warde, 2013: 24)

A more powerful challenge questioning the relevance of cultural capital came from the sociology of culture. Some scholars showed that the traditional opposition between highbrow and lowbrow culture was losing effectiveness to explain the organization of society as middle and upper-class members were appreciating highbrow and popular culture at the same time. This new finding led towards the development of the omnivorous thesis (Peterson and Kern,1996), which claimed that cultural capital was an outdated concept that failed to grasp the new contemporary trends within the cultural realm (Chan and Goldthorpe, 2007).

The omnivore is characterised by its tolerance and openness, by the possession of an extensive repertoire of tastes and a disposition to embrace diversity. The omnivore combines artefacts and practices from different levels of the cultural hierarchy since ‘‘he does not draw cultural boundaries to exclude other social groups, and presents few indications of snobbishness when expressing personal cultural tastes’’ (Warde, Wright and Gayo-Cal, 2007: 158). The omnivore is generally a highly educated person that enjoys and combines classical music with popular styles such as rap music or pop (Peterson, 2005). He enjoys popular products such as comics, Television or rock music, and possesses a wide array of cultural resources.

While at the beginning omnivorousness seemed to point towards the diffusion of a liberal democratising cultural model; sooner researchers began to observe how openness towards the difference and embracing diversity were becoming principles of distinction and mechanisms of boundary creation (Lizardo and Skiles, 2012). For this reason, despite the criticism and without rejecting the omnivorous disposition of upper and middle class members, some academics observed that instead of representing a step towards cultural

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homogeneity or the negation of social class as a source of cultural distinction, those persons in higher position were still using their judgements, taste and lifestyles to evaluate cultural products, (re)producing in this way cultural distinction (Friedman and Kuipers, 2013). Therefore, they claimed that cultural capital was still a relevant concept that has the capacity to explain the relationship between class relations and the new ways in which cultural consumption and lifestyles are creating distinction and reproducing inequality; leading them to advocate the necessity to study these new dynamics. This research adds to this efforts and intends to follow the line of research opened by the reconceptualization of cultural capital termed as emerging cultural capital12 (Prieur and Savage, 2013), with the aim of providing clearer accounts about how distinction is enacted in the present.

3.2 Emerging cultural capital:

The reconceptualization of cultural capital has resulted in a change in the approach to the study of cultural consumption. The focus has shifted from studying taste differences to study ways of engagement; i.e., the ways of consuming and relating with cultural products may be more significant to understand how distinction is enacted than taste preferences or what is consumed (Friedman, Savage, Hanquinet and Miles, 2015). The emergence of new forms of cultural capital may be creating social inequality beyond the traditional oppositional logic between highbrow and lowbrow taste in the field of arts.13_{In this}

regard, it is the inability to create and develop certain practices what might be creating inequality in new ways; where the emphasis is ‟less on the choices of particular objects and more on the way to relate to these objects’’ (Prieur and Savage, 2013: 257).

Emerging cultural capital places engagement as the main axis of cultural difference. There is an opposition between the persons who frequently engage in all sorts of cultural activities and those who are somewhat more disengaged (Prieur and Savage, 2013). Therefore, to understand better how distinction works we have to understand not only what types of objects are consumed, but also the ways in which they are consumed

12_{Emerging Cultural Capital follows the line of work of sociologists such as Mike Savage and Annick}

Prieur. There are other sociologists working on reformulations of cultural capital but not necessarily use this term to describe the changes on it. For example: Higarashi and Saito (2015) on how the educational system helps to institutionalize cosmopolitanism as cultural capital. However, since this research focuses on new ways of cultural distinction we use this term.

13_{Although some scholars (Jarness, 2017) remark that such simplification arises from a simplistic}

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(Hennion, 2001; Holt, 1997). For Jarness (2015) The forms of relating with cultural products vary qualitatively depending on the class location. Thus, if we shift the focus of attention from ‘’what’’ people consume to ‘’how’’ they consume it, we will be able to understand the complexity of narratives and modes of relating with cultural objects that sometimes statistical categories of analysis might obscure. Since cultural products currently are more open and cultural divisions are less marked, people are expected to be more diverse in their cultural choices and practices (Coulangeon, 2015). Hence, cultural distinction is not anchored in attending a music gig, eating out in an ethnic restaurant or attending a museum given that these activities are widely accessible but in the ways of engagement and narratives underlying these choices.

Another critical mechanism creating distinction is the effect of age and generation in structuring cultural tastes and practices. ‘’ younger age people have usually been found to differ widely from older age groups in terms of cultural orientations’’ (Savage et al., 2018; 141). This has led some scholars to question whether the transition from the hierarchical cultural mode to the omnivorous mode has not been the result of generational change. For example, in the Netherlands was found that differences between generations provide the best explanation for the divergence in cultural participation (Van Eijck and Wim Knulst, 2005).

Under these premises, sociology is finding new axis of distinction, where oppositions are being drawn between new versus old (Bellavance, 2008), authentic versus inauthentic (Michael, 2015) and national versus cosmopolitan (Prieur and Savage, 2013; Calhoun, 2002). It is within these new dynamics, where the relationship between rankings and ratings and the way in how people plan and asses their cultural practices emerge as a relevant field of study. The ways in which people use rankings and ratings might be related with cultural distinction and the reproduction of inequality. Especially because cultural consumption is increasingly mediated by the digital field, which at the same time is related with the challenge to traditional cultural authorities. For this reason, the relevance of this research lies in understanding how the increasingly relevant role of rankings and ratings as a cultural intermediary is intertwined with the development of reflexivity as an important asset to navigate the wide variety of cultural forms.

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3.3 Knowingness: reflexive appropriation of culture:

The emergence of new forms of cultural capital is underpinned by the growing importance of the ways of relating and appropriating cultural objects as a source of cultural distinction. Nowadays, what is becoming more valued is the capacity to shift between different genres and cultural references. Emerging cultural capital consists on demonstrating the skills to shift between choices; on the ability to pick, choose and combine the best of different ranges of culture (Savage, 2015). The appropriation of certain cultural objects such as restaurants, movies or music is less important ‘’than participating and having conversational competence in this specialized, esoteric, and dynamic aesthetic’’ (Holt, 1997: 104).14

This development is intertwined with the emergence of a knowing self-reflexive mode of cultural appropriation based on the self-conscious capacity to navigate across a wide array of cultural forms in discriminating ways (Prieur and Savage, 2013). Hence, in the cultural domain it is increasingly important, not only what we consume, but how we consume it. As Prieur and Savage remark (p111) ‘’all cultural appropriation is reflexive in some sense of the word’’ But what emerging cultural capital entails is a knowing way of referring to cultural objects where cultural ‘’appreciation also requires the knowledge to decode something: to interpret shows, to recognize genres, to make meaningful taste judgements’’15_{(Kuipers, 2006: 360) .}

With the transition into post-modern societies, the responsibility for taking the right choices and knowing how to act is placed on the individual (Lizardo and Strand, 2010). In culture, individuals find not only the repertoires they can use in every situation but also different ways of choosing, i.e. they find specific culturally driven modes of choice for different situations (Schwarz, 2017). These developments have changed the orientation of individuals towards the established cultural model. If the traditional highbrow hierarchical model of culture was based on an aesthetic orientation that promoted the abstraction from the mundane; the shift towards post-modern societies has entailed the development of a model of cultural practice based on experience, performativity and

14_{Bourdieu warned us about the risk of believing that the process of cultural distinction is a conscious}

planned process. For him distinction was the unconscious result of individuals filtering in their habitus the dispositions in relation to their position in social space.

15_{Although the original article focuses on Television, this remarks can be extended into different cultural}

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engagement in legitimate cultural activities (Friedman et al, 2015). If in the highbrow model ‘’aesthetic excellence involves the abstraction from the workaday world of necessity which allowed the educated classes to appreciate cultural forms’’ (Savage et al., 2018: 139). The latter model of cultural practice emphasises the value of participation rather than retreat and introspection.

It is necessary to remark that engagement does not signify passivity or disengagement per se. Taylor (2016) found that only 11% of the British population does not engage in any cultural activities. Thus, what we observe is some forms of cultural consumption that are more valued than others. The legitimacy of the engagement depends on the symbolic value of cultural products. In this way, reflexivity has become an embodied form of cultural capital, where the capacity to engage critically and make sense of what happens around is associated with high cultural capital (Threadgold and Nilan, 2009). For example, Corbett and Wessels (2017) found that film viewers in the United Kingdom examine and reflect on the range of possibilities and available opportunities to watch films. People consider for example the number of venues available in their area or the type of audiences attending the movie. People do not just watch films, but they reflect upon what is available and what type of cultural experience they want. Furthermore, authors such as Beverly Skeggs (2004) have proclaimed that rather than the proof of the declining relevance of social class, reflexivity represents the middle-class definition of the subject. A subject characterised by its ability to range across different cultural registers.

3.4 The ‘’how’’ in young people’s cultural consumption

The development of new forms of cultural capital has an age dimension. Some researchers have demonstrated how today young people are relating to cultural products and activities differently than older generations (Friedman et al., 2015; van Eijck and Knulst, 2005). Young people are less interested in traditional highbrow cultural products and seem more interested in enjoying popular cultural products; this seems to point to a change in the symbolic hierarchy. Moreover, there has also been a steady decline in their participation in arts (Roose and Daenekindt, 2015). Lizardo and Skiles (2012) have demonstrated how in the United States, the status of traditional highbrow forms of music such as classical music or opera is declining, and more contemporary forms such as rap and hip-hop that

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were traditionally vilified, now have an increasing legitimate position within symbolic space.

Young people display a greater tendency to express cultural distinction in terms of knowingness, ways of engagement and modes of appreciation rather than in terms of the traditional Kantian aesthetics opposition, which is more prevalent among older people (Coulangeon, 2017; Bennett et al., 2009). For young individuals, knowing which is the ideal context and which are the adequate repertoires needed in different contexts is a more distinctive marker of legitimacy (Friedman et al., 2015). In this way, young individuals in order to claim distinction need:

to be able to differentiate oneself […] from the undiscriminating use of leisure pursuits and the media by those with too much time on their hands […] in celebrating the sophistication and knowingness of its protagonists, it draws contrast with those who lack the capacity to handle culture knowingly’’ (Prieur and Savage, 2015: 316). While young professionals and working-class members might share a common interest in certain products, there are symbolic boundaries that separate their modes of consumption. For example, the popularity of ‘’crap TV’’ among British young professionals highlights how the capacity to consume TV content in ironic terms allows people to watch it without negative consequences for their cultural status. This is because they can they show their knowledge about the signifiers of taste and separate their mode of consumption from a more serious one (Bennett et al., 2009). Furthermore, the cultural consumption of young individuals is increasingly mediated by digital technologies and the use of technological gadgets (Magaudda, 2011). They tend to be early-adopters of technologies and act innovatively in their consumption. For example, in Europe, young people use more online streaming services and download music illegally more than any other population group (Aguiar and Martens, 2016), they also derive more satisfaction from handling, accessing and organizing large digital music collections (Kibby, 2009). For these reasons, given their novel and innovative style of consumption, the analysis of how young high educated individuals use rankings and ratings might provide a better picture to understand how these gadgets are intertwined to cultural distinction.

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4 Methodology: Research design, sample and data collection:

The research was conducted under the assumption that the research problem dictates the method. For this reason, in order to understand the modes of using rankings and ratings among young people and their relationship with cultural capital, we considered that a qualitative approach using semi-structured interviews was better positioned for the task. A qualitative approach allows understanding the meanings people confer to their surrounding world (Lofland et al., 2006). This approach was especially appropriate to capture processes of cultural differentiation, given that allows to compare how people ''perform their taste, and how they classify and evaluate in their own words'' (Michael, 2017: 33). The majority of research in cultural stratification and consumption is based on quantitative methods, which capture the cultural products that people consume and in which activities they participate (Friedman et al., 2015). However, some researchers such as Jarness (2015) have cautioned against the risk of quantitative methods conflating different ways of relating with a cultural object under the same statistical category. On the other hand, interviews facilitate a better in-depth understanding of meaning-making processes such as representations, classification systems, boundary work, identity, imagined realities and cultural ideals (Lamont and Swidler, 2014). For these reasons, a qualitative approach was deemed more indicated to understand better the subjective aspects of the relationship between cultural consumption, the use of rankings and ratings, the variations in the discourse of the respondents, and the relationship between knowingness and cultural capital.

4.1 Research Design and Analysis:

The research was conducted using a thematic analysis with a hybrid approach (Fereday and Muir-Cohrane, 2006). This method allowed the identification, analysis, organisation and description of patterns (or themes) detected in the data set (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The hybrid approach, i.e. the combination of different deductive and inductive moments was used during the research to analyse the data and secure the necessary information to understand the different modes of using rankings and ratings to apprehend culture. The theoretical framework was elaborated under the assumption of providing heavy guidance

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to the research. Some relevant codes were deducted from the literature However, some other codes emerged during the process of coding. The hybrid approach proved beneficial for the research, because, although there was a clear corpus defined, the lack of literature examining the relationship between rankings and ratings and cultural capital did not allow to create a previous clear model of how this relationship was articulated. Therefore, the iterative process where ‘’induction and deduction are in constant dialogue” (Erickson, 1986: 121) allowed a better clarity at the time to read through the data set.

The study was focused on the modes of using rankings and ratings to select cultural products in the culinary field and the film field. The decision to narrow the research to these two fields was based on the assumption that we had to find cultural fields where the use of rankings and ratings were so widespread that we could made respondents reflect and create a rich narrative about their practices. Both fields were considered appropriate given that the film field is characterised by the increasing use of online ratings by audiences (Verboord, 2014), and the culinary field is affected by the expansion of digital technologies (Johnstone and Baumann, 2014).

The research was conducted in London; the reason to select London as the field of study was twofold: Firstly, urban areas are essential to the articulation of emerging cultural capital (Savage et al., 2018) and London is a city with a population of 8.7 million people and comprises a metropolitan area of 14 million residents. Moreover, in the year 2015, 36,8% of the population was foreign-born, and currently comprises 270 nationalities and 300 different languages turning it into a cosmopolitan city. The multicultural dimension of London was relevant to our interests because in a city with high cultural diversity the wide variety of cultural products available, especially in the culinary field, were deemed related with the necessity to use more rankings and ratings. The interviews took place between April of 2018 and May of 2018 in London. (See Appendix D for interview questionnaire). I generally met with respondents in a cafeteria. It is necessary to remark that I conducted one interview through Skype with a Londoner once I had completed the fieldwork in London. However, the contents of the interview were not affected by the use of Skype.

The use of semi-structured interviews provided a structure to guide the interviews but at the same time was flexible enough to elicit new information that was emerging during the interview (Brinkmann, 2013). During the face-to-face interviews, respondents were asked about the uses and impact that ratings had on their cultural consumption practices

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and decisions in the film field and the culinary field. What they value in a review or how they use them. Furthermore, through the semi-structured interviews was possible to obtain an account of ‘’the body language, the atmosphere, and other non-transcribable features of the interaction’’ (Brinkmann, 2013: 29). The interviews were recorded with the permission of the respondents and later transcribed using SoundScriber. We used alias to maintain the confidentiality of respondents The interviews lasted on average between 30 and 40 minutes. Lasting the longest 56 minutes and the shortest 26 minutes. The interviews were held in English, Spanish or Catalan depending on which language the respondents felt more comfortable. The approach to the analysis of the interviews was constructivist because we wanted to understand how respondents reflected about the meanings they gave to rankings and ratings. The interviews were coded through a deductive/inductive approach using Atlas.ti (see Appendix C).

4.2 Research Question:

The research question that guided the research was:

• Does the use of rankings and ratings by young urban middle-class individuals in the choice of cultural products produces cultural distinction, and if so in what ways?

The research question was refined through the next sub-questions:

 Does the use of user-generated content sites or professional critics content

create distinction?

 How does reflexivity affect the use of rankings and ratings?

 Do all young high educated people use rankings and ratings in the same

manner?

In order to better conceptualise how the use of rankings and ratings entailed distinction we operationalised the concepts derived from the theoretical framework into four dimensions: uses, knowingness, distinction and content. The aim was to understand how young people use rankings and ratings, the differences in the legitimate ways of engagement with cultural products, how differences within the classed field of consumption followed the logic of distinction, and how the content of rankings and

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ratings was related to two different aesthetic logics. In this way, we expected to understand if the use of rankings and ratings produces distinction and the underlying processes anchoring distinction.

4.3 Sample: Recruitment strategy and challenges finding respondents:

The targeted research population were young urban individuals with higher education. The aim was to obtain a representation of the group that some research signals as the group most associated with emerging forms of cultural capital (Coulangeon, 2017). Respondents were recruited by snowball sampling (Noy, 2008). The requirements that guided the selection process were the following: Respondents had to have between 20 and 30 years of age. They also had to pertain to middle classes; the educational level acted as a proxy for their middle-class background (Embong, 2002). Finally, participants had to be London residents independently of their nationality. The sample obtained was formed by 19 individuals (see Appendix B for the profile of respondents). The sample comprised nine students and ten workers. I never intended to create a divide between workers and students. Nevertheless, this divide presented some benefits in terms of understanding the effect of economic capital on the use of rankings and ratings. In terms of gender, we achieved an egalitarian sample (nine women and ten men).

Initially, there were problems to keep the snowball rolling. Once the first round of interviews was conducted, there was an impasse where it was necessary to develop new approaches to activate the search for respondents. Nevertheless, overall I am satisfied with the sample obtained. During the fieldwork, I learned that the most critical step to got hold of a possible respondent was to set contact directly with the person and try to minimise as much as possible the intermediary role of the previous respondents. Generally, when I asked respondents about possible new participants, everyone thought of a friend to whom they would talk. However, in the end, anybody never got in contact with me. Everything worked better when instead of waiting for other respondents to got in ouch with future participants, I asked the respondent the contact (email or telephone) to manage personally the contact with the possible future respondent.

The sample presents some limitations as a result of initial problems finding participants once the first round of scheduled interviews stopped. To get more participants, I tried two different channels to recruit possible participants: Firstly, I restarted the snowball

Knowingness and emerging cultural capital : the use of rankings and ratings among young people in cultural consumption

Master Thesis