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Digital media are seen as important instruments of increasing participation and diversity in arts and culture. To examine whether this view is justified, this article draws on two bodies of research that have hitherto remained disconnected: research on cultural participation, and research on the digital divide. Building on these insights, the article examines the Taking Part Survey data on digital media and cultural participation in the UK between 2005/06 and 2015/16, focusing on museums and galleries. While the results confirm that digital media provide an important means of engaging new audiences, they also show that the engagement with museums and galleries both on-and off-line remains deeply unequal. Most worryingly, the gaps between the haves and the have nots are even wider on-line than in the case of physical visits. Rather than helping increase the diversity of audiences, online access seems to reproduce, if not enlarge, existing inequalities.

Music as a mechanism for social distinction is well established. Yet, perhaps more than any other form of cultural expression, it is music which has been systematically transformed by emerging technologies. From the gramophone, radio, cassette and CD, through to portable devices and shared through social media, music is in constant flux. To separate taste for music from its various acquisitional forms is to undermine its role in society. In this article, our aim is to integrate within taste and cultural consumption analysis a salient dimension, such as technologies to acquire music, conceptualized as modes of musical exchange and formats used to listen to music. We argue that these are components of musical consumption practices which enhance our understanding on how symbolic boundaries are shaped today. Using multiple factor analysis, this study provides a simultaneous analysis of musical tastes and technological engagement in Chile. We find that uses of technologies share a unique relationship to musical taste. Musical taste remains a relevant process of distinction, but modes of exchange prove to be an emerging property. They, however, do not create new symbolic boundaries; rather, they are important in reinforcing those that exist.

This paper addresses the concerns of the Understanding Everyday Participation project with the relationship between cultural participation and space. Here we approach the notion of space in two different but complementary ways. Our main focus is on geographical variations in participation, which we explore at the regional level in England. However, in order to do so, we begin by re-evaluating the nature of the cultural field itself and the way that this is arranged in social space. The issue of regional disparities in the funding of cultural activities and venues from the public purse has become a heated issue. Yet, in contrast to the avowedly regional focus of much cultural and creative industries policy following the advent of the first New Labour administration in 1997, issues of place have been largely overlooked in recent studies of cultural consumption, and therefore little is known about the spatial dynamics of participation practices. Using data from the UK government's Taking Part Survey, we adopt a novel methodological approach, known as Multiple Factor Analysis, to re-examine and represent the English cultural field. Our findings reveal the hitherto underestimated importance of informal everyday cultural practices in configuring the sociology of lifestyles. Alongside and beyond the familiar North-South divide and London effect, they also indicate that the English cultural field is characterised by a complex regional geography.

In this article we carry out the most comprehensive analysis of social and spatial mobility in the UK to date and the first to directly link different dimensions of mobility to processes of social class formation. Using new analytical techniques in this field, we integrate quantitative and qualitative data from the 1958 Birth Cohort Study, combining text‐mining and correspondence analysis in order to examine the intersection of geographical and social mobility with class identities. This work reflects a revival of interest in the spatialization of class inequalities, which is connected to policy concerns about the regional dimension of Britain’s mobility ‘crisis’ that have intensified in the wake of the ‘Brexit’ vote. We find that the South’s role as an ‘escalator’ region for upward mobility has continued and that the relationship between social and spatial mobility both confirms and qualifies the role of London and the South East in generating inequalities. We show that different migration‐mobility transitions are associated with distinctive and contrasting class identity narratives. Those who move from North to South stand out in particular for the way their ‘class talk’ reveals the social disorientation that attends their success. The contrasting ways in which other groups express their social identities suggests that the interplay of geographical and social mobilities performs a significant role in regional cultural divisions.

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Over the last 10–15 years, Western societies have faced two interrelated social changes: the digitalization of media and the increase in socio-political polarization. While their relationship is causally reciprocal, population-level empirical studies focusing on over-time change remain scarce. We adopt the temporal perspective on the socio-political stratification of media usage in the context of Finland, one of the so-called Nordic media welfare states. We ask whether the ways in which media usage is socially stratified has changed from 2007 to 2018 and whether there is political polarization of media consumption. We draw on two nationally representative comparative surveys, collected in 2007 ( N = 1388) and 2018 ( N = 1425), and show that the main media usage patterns—the wide, the narrow, and the Internet-focused media repertoires—differ both in terms of their sociodemographic and political profiles and that the opposition between the wide and the narrow repertoires becomes increasingly polarized.

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