Cultural products go online: Comparing the internet and print media on distributions of gender, genre and commercial success

This article examines whether the attention to cultural products on the internet is more democratically structured (in terms of gender and genre distributions) than in traditional print media, and how these types of media attention affect commercial success. For the U.S. fiction book releases in February 2009, I analyze consumer ratings at the web store Amazon.com and the social networking site Goodreads.com. The results show that on the internet far more books receive attention, and that this indeed comes to the advantage of female authors and authors of popular fiction. Moreover, online publicity positively affects commercial success. These outcomes suggest that online attention to cultural products dampens the effects of institutionally embedded evaluations, while word-of-mouth mechanisms are becoming increasingly prominent in terms of how cultural products are discussed

Internet usage and cosmopolitanism in Europe: a multilevel analysis

Despite the transnational interconnected nature of the internet, cross-national comparisons in internet usage and their effects are still relatively scarce. Moreover, one of the core intrinsic properties that internet theorists have distinguished, the ability to increase democracy and ‘global understanding’ through its connectivity, has hardly been empirically studied. This paper examines how internet usage affects individuals’ openness to other cultures: cosmopolitanism. I analyze two manifestations of such openness: first, the cosmopolitan orientation toward other cultures in the broad sense; second, the interest in foreign cultural expressions. Using Eurobarometer data on 29 European countries, the results show that interactive internet practices are positively associated with openness to foreign culture. Buying culture online is positively related to interest in concrete expressions, but negatively to cosmopolitan orientation. Importantly, individual effects on cosmopolitan orientation are often moderated by the country people live in, whereas effects on interest in foreign expressions are more stable across Europe

Market logic and cultural consecration in French, German and American bestseller lists, 1970-2007

This paper analyzes how cultural classification has changed, during the period 1970-2007, in France, Germany and the United States for one particular case: fiction book bestseller lists. Drawing on recent studies in the material production (the publishing field) and symbolic production (the literary field) of literature, I examine the impact of the market logic and cultural consecration on the content of bestseller lists by (a) mapping trends, (b) comparing countries and (c) conducting multivariate analyses. To do so, I offer a nested, multilevel approach that attends to producers, authors and product types. The results show that, in all three countries, authors who have properties that signal the market logic become more dominant, while retrospectively consecrated authors less often make the lists. This trend is stronger for the US than for Germany and France. The differences between the latter two countries decline over time

Dimensions of Conventionality and Innovation in Film: The Cultural Classification of Blockbusters, Award Winners, and Critics' Favourites

Today's complex film world seems to upset the dual structure corresponding with Bourdieu's categorization of 'restricted' and 'large-scale' fields of cultural production. This article examines how movies in French, Dutch, American and British film fields are classified in terms of material practices and symbolic affordances. It explores how popular, professional, and critical recognition are related to film production as well as interpretation. Analysis of the most successful film titles of 2007 offers insight into the film field's differentiation. Distinction between mainstream and artistic film shows a gradual rather than a dichotomous positioning that spans between conventionality and innovation. Apparently, the intertwining of small-scale and large-scale film fields cannot be perceived as a straightforward loss of distinction or an overall shift of production logics, but rather as 'production on the boundaries' in which filmmakers combine production logics to cater to publics with various levels of aesthetic fluency and omnivorous taste patterns

Constructing authority in the digital age:Comparing book reviews of professional and amateur critics

How do cultural critics in the digital age convince audiences that their writings are valuable? What discursive strategies do they employ to construct their authority? And which differences can we see between professional critics working in institutionalized media and amateur critics contributing to online platforms? This article presents an in-depth analysis of book reviews by different critics to answer these questions. The results indicate that long-standing critical strategies are still largely intact: both professional and amateur critics construct authority by analyzing the book, contextualizing the book and discussing its reception, suggesting that amateurs have adopted to a large degree the skill sets of professionals. At the same time, amateur critics distinguish themselves by a pronounced presence of their personal experience in their reviews. This could point to a new way of constructing authority