From Ivory Tower to Cross-Media Personas

Abstract

This article introduces a theoretical typology of four rival yet converging ideal types of cultural critics in contemporary media culture and in cultural journalism, more specifically, encapsulated by the term the heterogeneous cultural critic and characterized by different kinds of authority and expertise: (1) the intellectual cultural critic, who is closely connected to an aesthetic tradition, bohemia and/or academia, or institutionalized cultural capital; (2) the professional cultural journalist, who is first and foremost 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 charismatic media performances; and (4) the everyday amateur expert, who offers subjective opinions and represents experience-based cultural taste. The aim is to provide an analytical minimum model for future empirical studies by outlining the contours of the multiple, objective and subjective, professional and non-professional cultural “authorities” of contemporary media culture.

KEYWORDS:

• celebrity capital
• charismatic authority
• cultural criticism in the media
• cultural journalism
• heterogeneous cultural critics
• media capital
• media intellectuals

Notes

1. American ProJared has more than 570,000 followers on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/user/DMJared/about, accessed April 15, 2015), while Swedish PewDiePie has more than 36 million followers on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/user/PewDiePie/about, accessed April 15, 2015).