Cultural Critique: Re-negotiating cultural authority in digital media culture

Abstract

Th is special issue explores how authority and expertise in cultural critique are being renegotiated in the digital media landscape. Over the past decades, digital media technologies, particularly social media platforms, have enabled increased public participation in debates about arts and culture, but they have also challenged intellectual authority, enlightenment and knowledge. Today traditional institutions, such as academia and the news media, which are associated with intellectual and public authority, are not the only avenues for cultural critique. Rather, cultural critique and critical authority are constantly performed and (re)negotiated in various types of digital media by intellectuals, journalists and pundits, vloggers/bloggers and podcasters, as well as celebrities and ordinary people. Th is reconfi guration of the critical public sphere has given rise to new forms of critical expression and action. It has made cultural critique the purview of a wide range of people, which might be seen as a democratization of the cultural public sphere. Many scholars, however, frame this change within a narrative of decline. James Elkins, for example, opens his book, What Happened to Arts Criticism, with the paradoxical statement that "Arts criticism is in worldwide crisis […] at the very same time, art criticism is also healthier than ever […] So it's dying but it's everywhere" (2003, p. 2). Similarly, Ronan McDonald proclaims "the death of the critic," the title of his book from 2007. Th is decline narrative taps into broader scholarly and public debates about societal institutions' loss of authority (Furedi, 2013; Inglehart, 1999), the "death of expertise" (Nichols, 2017) and the weakening of public trust in, for example, institutionalized news media (Fletcher & Park, 2017), most MedieKultur 65

Enhancing the Competitiveness of the Show Business Industry for Cultural Export as a Means of Creative Economy Development and Tourism Promotion in the Future New Normal Era: The Case of Thailand

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The space of media usage in Finland, 2007 and 2018: The impact of online activities on its structure and its association with sociopolitical divisions

“…Second, online platforms and algorithms (e.g., via their recommendation systems) have become the infrastructures that increasingly shape "encounters with culture", in addition to the traditional taste communities based on individuals' sociodemographic position and offline interactions and networks (Beer, 2013;Webster, 2019Webster, , 2020. Third, "amateur" or peer-produced reviewing in social media and other online platforms challenges the cultural authority of traditional criticism (Kristensen et al, 2018;Verboord, 2014). Fourth, it has been argued that social media has entailed unprecedented audience fragmentation furthering political polarisation, although the evidence for this is mixed (e.g., Dubois & Blank, 2018).…”

The emergence of promotional gatekeeping and converged local music professionals on social media

“…Namely, in the context of the rise of participatory digital media technologies that challenge traditional cultural authority and institutionally affiliated cultural experts (Kristensen et al, 2018), music, as well as information about music, has become widely accessible and the ideological role of rock critics as musical authorities has become redundant (Frith, 2019: 515). This article explores the transformations of such musical authority on social media.…”