Abstract
In this article, I analyse digital distinction mechanisms in young people’s cross media engagement with news. Using a combination of open online diaries and qualitative interviews with young Danes aged 15 to 18 who differ in social background and education, and with Bourdieu’s field theory as an analytical framework, the article investigates how cultural capital (CC) operates in specific tastes and distastes for news genres, platforms and providers. The article argues that distinction mechanism not only works on the level of news providers and news genres but also on the level of engagement practices—the ways in which people enact and describe their own news engagement practices. Among those rich in CC, physical, analogue objects in the form of newspapers and physical conversations about news are seen as ‘better’ that digital ones, resulting in a feeling of guilt when they mostly engage with news on social media. Secondly, young people with lower CC discard legacy news, which they see as elitist and irrelevant. Thirdly, those rich in CC are media and news genre savvy in the sense that it makes them able to critically evaluate the news they engage with across platforms and sites.
Highlights
This has been done within studies of consumption and appreciation of art (Holt, 1997), but this study shows similar mechanisms of difference in current news engagement practices, not just between news outlets and genres, and between technological devices and platforms and the ways of describing the use of these for engagement with news on various platforms and devices
Digital distinction has been studied as the choices made by similar university students in terms of socio-economic status between different websites, relating them to other cultural practices (Bengtsson, 2015). It has been studied in the context of how internet use is related to democratic behaviours and engagement, and how different groups with diverse economic and cultural capital (CC) use and navigate digital media and the possible democratic consequences hereof, often referred to as the ‘digital divide’ (Gripsrud, Hovden, & Moe, 2011; Hargittai, 2010; Hollingworth, Mansaray, Allen, & Rose, 2011; Kalmus, Realo, & Siibak, 2011; Meyen, PfaffRüdiger, Dudenhöffer, & Huss, 2010; Robinson, 2009; Zillien & Hargittai, 2009). What this body of literature tells us is that CC matters when manoeuvring the digital sphere, but this cultural approach has only very recently been applied to the study of people’s distinctions and classifying practices when engaging with news
Confirming what we know from earlier studies (Costera Meijer, 2007; Newman et al, 2017; Sveningsson, 2015) the analysis show how social media, and especially Facebook, is the dominant media platform from which they access and engage with news
Summary
Like Barnhurst and Wartella (1998), she supports the conclusion that young people experience news as just one genre out of many in the neverending flow of television images They do not draw a strict line between entertainment and information, and to develop their political awareness they rely on a much broader set of programs and media than just news in the classical sense. This article contributes, in a qualitative way, to this line of research, but it argues for a need to shift focus to include distinction practices—the attitudes and values to the ways we engage with news, in the analysis of fragmented and dispersed news consumption patterns This has been done within studies of consumption and appreciation of art (Holt, 1997), but this study shows similar mechanisms of difference in current news engagement practices, not just between news outlets and genres, and between technological devices and platforms and the ways of describing the use of these for engagement with news on various platforms and devices. The article is a step on the way of updating field theory, paving the way for further analysis of emerging forms of capital in a high choice digital news media environment
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