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

Cultural critics conquering Twitter – intellectual battlefield, institutional branding, and arena for (self)promotion

by Unni From and Nete Nørgaard Kristensen

This subproject analyses cultural critics’ and journalists’ use of Twitter as an intellectual battlefield to exchange and negotiate cultural authority, knowledge, and taste. It hypothesizes that these agents use Twitter not only for live-updates, ongoing discussions and self- presentation (Bruns & Burgess 2012), but also to promote their professional and personal ’brand’ and the (media/cultural) institution they represent by interconnecting and displaying networks.

While most existing studies on Twitter-journalism focus on news and political journalism more generally (e.g., Artwick, 2013; Parmekee, 2013; Vis, 2013), fewer analyse how Twitter is used within specific beats. Thus, taking our point of departure in cultural journalism and criticism as a specific journalistic turf, it is argued that the specificities of this particular beat influence the performances and authority of cultural personas on Twitter. More specifically the project argues that the Twitter-interactions of various intellectuals, experts, and ordinary users create new types of networks of cultural authority.

Theoretically, the project is based on the concept and typology of the ‘heterogeneous cultural critic’ (Kristensen & From, 2015), combined with theories on personal branding or self-branding on social media (e.g., Marwick & Boyd 2011, Page 2012).

Methodologically, the subproject is based on qualitative content analysis of selected Danish Twitter accounts, representing the various ideal types of cultural critics' stipulated by Kristensen & From's typology (the cultural intellectual, the professional, cultural journalist, the media made arbiter of taste and the everyday amateur expert), which will be combined with semi-structured, qualitative interviews with the agents behind the selected Twitter accounts.

The aim is to provide empirical grounds for theorizing how social media, e.g., Twitter, 1) play an important part in constructing, redefining, and (re)circulating cultural authority and legitimacy in contemporary media and journalism, and 2) contribute to the blurring of boundaries of the public and the private professional (cultural) journalist.