From Ivory Tower to Twitter (FITT): Rethinking the cultural critic in contemporary media culture

Theoretical typology: The Heterogeneous Cultural Critic

FITT proposes the new theoretical concept ‘the heterogeneous cultural critic’, which builds on Bourdieu’s notion of ’the cultural intermediary’ (1984). Bourdieu’s concept refers to agents, i.e. cultural critics and cultural journalists, who in the second part of the 20th century were increasingly professionalised and institutionalised and acquired a central role in the mediation between cultural production and consumption. Thus, while Bourdieu’s concept was introduced in a media context quite different from the present, FITT’s idea of ‘The Heterogeneous Cultural Critic’ aims to rethink the cultural intermediary in a contemporary cross-media environment.

‘The Heterogeneous Cultural Critic’ covers a typology of four rivalling, yet converging ideal-types:

  1. ‘the intellectual cultural critic’, whose authority is closely connected to an aesthetic tradition and academia

  2. ‘the professional cultural journalist’, who may associate her/himself with the intellectual, but whose authority is equally embedded in a media professional logic

  3. ‘the media-made arbiter of taste’, whose authority is closely linked to practical experience with cultural production and repeated media performances, drawing on professional customs and personal charisma, and

  4. ‘the everyday amateur expert’, engaging in cultural debate and reviewing on digital media platforms and representing subjective opinions, experience-based cultural taste, and democratic or layman’s authority.

The former two, well-established types are challenged and influenced by the latter two newcomers, who have increasingly come to dominate mediated cultural opinion making.

Empirical testing across cultural topics and media platforms

FITT maps and analyses the cultural discussions and debates provided by these heterogeneous cultural critics in columns and reviews in print/online newspapers, in broadcast television, and in social media and online forums, based on professional productions and user-generated content in relation to a range of cultural topics, displaying the variations and span of mediated cultural critics and criticism today.

The four-sided typology of the ‘heterogeneous cultural critic’ provides a shared theoretical and analytical framework for the seven FITT-subprojects, which analyses intellectuals, celebrities, journalists and amateurs critical media performances on various platforms.

This rethinking of cultural critics within a media framework counterbalances international research’s often one-sided framing of cultural criticism as in either decline or as prospering.