From Ivory Tower to Twitter: Rethinking the Cultural Critic in Contemporary Media Culture

The professional ideology of arts and culture reviewers – and amateurs’ relationship to it

by Aske Kammer

In a highly influential 2005 article, Deuze identifies the five professional norms or ideological dimensions that constitute the foundation of journalism: objectivity, immediacy, (the conducting of a) public service, autonomy, and ethics. With inspiration from this article and on the basis of a literature review, this subproject aims at identifying the professional ideology of arts and culture reviewers, asking what characterizes the work that arts and culture reviewers do.

This work will constitute the theoretical framework for further empirical analysis of the extent to which amateur reviewers online adhere to the professional ideology of arts and culture reviewers. Do they follow the same norms and approaches as professionals who are situated within the organizational framework of the established mass media? Or do they, in their capacity of “free agents”, play by a different set of rules?

This analytical – and central – part of the subproject draws upon the concept of the “everyday amateur expert” (Kristensen and From, 2015), which is the ideal-type of cultural critic that it will explore empirically, and builds upon the researcher’s earlier mapping of websites that conduct post-industrial cultural criticism (Kammer, 2015). It explores issues concerning the motivations, practices, communicative networks, and (absent) economic incentives for the amateur reviewers.

In a larger sociological context, the subproject connects to one of the researcher’s central research interests, namely how new digital media transform institutionalized social roles and challenge the established order of the media industry.