"And like that I'm talking to a Girl from China, you know" : Cultural capital and the classification of media as avenues of cosmopolitan cultivation

• The phenomenon of a “mediated cosmopolitanism” has mainly been studied from a perspective that attempts to discern the extent to which various messages of the media succeed or fail in establishing moral solidarity with “the distant other”. This perspective misses two crucial points worthy of pursuing when attempting to understand the relationship between media and cosmopolitanism. Firstly, it still remains rather unclear what sense audiences and users make of the globalizing potential of the contemporary media landscape. Secondly, cosmopolitanism cannot solely be conceptualized as a moral obligation across vast distances, but needs also to be understood as a form of capital, as social fields become increasingly transnational. By understanding users and audiences of potentially global media as contextualized social agents we engage with the relationship between cosmopolitanism and the media from a new vantage point. In departing from the media-centric tendencies in the research area, we turn to the question of how classified social agents classify the contemporary media landscape as gateways to the wider world. What emerges in our qualitative and quantitative data is a pattern of social reproduction – agents strong on cultural capital are particularly prone to approach the media landscape as an avenue for the generation of cosmopolitan capital. There is thus reason to question the universalizing rhetoric pertaining to notions of a “mediated cosmopolitanism” and study the ways in which agents’ orientations in the media landscape are part of strategies of social reproduction.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Cultural capital

cosmopolitan capital

mediated cosmopolitanism

Bourdieu

social reproduction

distinction

Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap

Media and Communication Studies

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)