Johan Lindell

This study presents an exploratory approach to the analysis of social differences in smartphone use. Previous research has predominantly focused on problematic smartphone use and addiction. By contrast, this study turns to the research program of Pierre Bourdieu to forward a sociological study on social differences in how people use their smartphones. Using multiple correspondence analysis of Swedish survey data ( n = 2,401), the study explores the structure of the “space of smartphone use.” This space is characterized by two main oppositions: high vs. low volumes of smartphone use on the one hand, and degree of investment in legitimized uses on the other. While age and gender remain key factors in explaining how people position themselves in this space, we show that cultural capital, economic capital, and habitus shape these differences. Privileged social positions tend to “push” social agents toward more frequent and legitimized smartphone uses. Social inequalities shape smartphone uses, particularly among older generations.

Whereas media reliance is one of the classical concepts in media and communication studies, this article argues that deep mediatization imposes a renewed relevance of the term, as well as a need to develop a more nuanced framework for studying its social implications. Traditionally, media reliance was used to explain how people develop a citizen identity. Today, while connective media, datafication and AI have transformed what it means to be reliant on media, the very concept is marginalized and theoretically under-developed. Against this backdrop, the article starts out from an overview of how media reliance, and related terms, have been utilized in media research and then develops an analytical framework that accounts for different social modes and realms of media reliance. The matrix is implemented to crystallize blind spots in the research field and to highlight new types of questions that different research strands could address in times of pervasive connectivity.

Pierre Bourdieu’s La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (1979), or, as it is called in its English translation, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, is a pioneering sociological work that forwards a new understanding of social life in regard to how power and social status manifest in consumption and lifestyles. This chapter presents the broad characteristics of Bourdieu’s social scientific outlook and outlines the central arguments in La Distinction. It also touches on how Bourdieu’s cultural sociology was practically carried out and, finally, what role Bourdieu’s work has played in media and communication studies.

The relationship between media practices and social inequality has been studied within a range of sub-disciplines in media and communication studies and cultural sociology. In various, more or less direct, ways these studies point to the fact that habitus – the socially formed class specific relations to the social world – generates certain tastes, lifestyles, practices and preferences. When social groups form relatively distinct media practices, and distance themselves from the practices of other groups, they reproduce their social position, and ‘make’ their class. By analysing in-depth interviews with members of an emerging cultural middle-class, this study shows how class-making also manifests in the ways in which people expect that others would ‘look down’ on their media practices. By anticipating stigma from imagined others, the cultural middle-class stays in line with class-specific lifestyles and media practices, thus cementing their distinct character in the social space.

What does media welfare mean from a normative perspective? The notion of media welfare and “the media welfare state” has mainly been used descriptively, to depict the particular way in which the media are organized in the Nordic welfare states. In this article, we explore media welfare from a normative perspective. Our intention is to open up a discussion about the normative and political implications of the notion of media welfare and to bring the concept into the contemporary discussion on normative perspectives regarding the media.

A great amount of effort has gone into studying correspondences between contemporary class structures and the distribution of lifestyles and media practices therein. Structural overlaps between these spaces imply the existence of a symbolic order, where dominant factions of society constitute taste keepers endowed with the power to stigmatize those below them in the social hierarchy. Yet, research has not come to terms with the reach and depth of this symbolic order. This study combines the Bourdieusian approach with recent developments in stigma research and the notion of felt stigma. Using multiple correspondence analysis on a survey with the adult Swedish population (n = 2003) findings align with previous research in that the social space is built around capital volume and capital composition, and that media practices connect to that structure. This symbolic order is not, however, internalized by people at lower social positions. Instead, it is people invested in culture and arts – a cultural middle-class – who are most likely to anticipate that others would look down on their practices and preferences.

While research on news avoidance has surged in the last couple of decades, we are still at a scholarly shortage in terms of understanding and theorizing the relationship between social class and the inclination to tune out on the news. In addressing this gap, we rely on a mail-back survey with ten thousand Swedes to study how social class predicts the likelihood of avoiding news from different digital outlets. Results show that people at lower social positions, measured as their relative lack of cultural and economic capital, are significantly more likely to avoid online news. A lack of cultural capital predicts total news avoidance online, avoiding online public service news and the “quality news,” while it lessens the likelihood of avoiding “popular news” online. Lacking economic capital predicts total news avoidance online and avoiding the “popular news.” We conclude the article with three cultural sociological lessons for the study of news avoidance. We call for sensitivity in regard to (1) the multi-dimensional character of social inequality, (2) the symbolic value of different types of news genres and outlets, and (3) social inequality in the normative problematizations of news avoidance.

Bourdieu-inspired journalism scholarship, and journalism studies at large, could benefit from an approach that can holistically explain how journalists make sense of technology-related change in the journalistic field. By merging key insights from field theory with philosophy of technology, and by analyzing 40 qualitative interviews with agents across a wide range of positions in the Swedish journalistic field, we uncover how journalists view technological change in relation to the field's autonomy, capitals and habitus. At the macro-level, the analysis shows how technology is constructed in the journalistic field at large, indicating a digital heteronomy. At the meso-level, findings indicate that positions become rearranged when new skills such as metrics and engagement management become collectively recognized as capital. Field-specific, journalistic, capital is supplemented with a virality capital. At the micro-level, we unravel an emerging journalistic habitus formed in relation to structural transformations in the field – the feel for engagement.

During the last decades the Nordic media model has been challenged by neoliberal policy and welfare retrenchment. This study asks about the extent to which the values, functions and institutions of the “media welfare state” are supported by the adult Swedish citizenry, despite political mobilization against it. Drawing on a national survey (n = 2003) this study shows that the media welfare state is generally well-supported by the population. Using exploratory statistical analysis, we identify a media welfare state of mind. While widespread in the population, this attitudinal constellation is more common in older segments of the population, in the working-class, and by those who frequently use and trust public service media. The main conclusion is that support for the media welfare state primarily can be explained by political attitudes, where left-leaning and GAL-oriented individuals are more positive than people holding right-wing and TAN-attitudes.