Semester 2, academic year 2023/2024
By Xinfeng Gu
This study aims to explore how two emerging platforms in the digital age influence cultural hierarchies. First, the streaming media platforms have become increasingly important in people’s lives given its unprecedented capacity to popularize and globalize cultural products, yet debate remains surrounding its role as a democratizing force within the culture sphere. Second, the rise of social media platforms has challenged the elite discourse that was historically upheld by elite journalism in the field of culture, while the extent and trends are difficult to quantify. These shifts prompt an inquiry into the difference in changing discourse between journalism and social media platform in the last two decades, and how the enlarging or narrowing of the discursive gap—serving as a representative of cultural hierarchy—relates to the streaming media platform. In this study, an automated content analysis will be conducted on music reviews from art journalism and online forum. Utilizing Concept Mover’s Distance (CMD) to gauge the concept engagement, we will measure the discourse of each music review along two conceptual dimensions—legitimacy and gender—in a word-embedding space. To validate the accuracy of the approach in measuring concepts, human coders will manually code a portion of the data. Upon validation, CMD will be computed for the entire dataset. Subsequently, the relationship between characteristics at both news agency level and music streaming platform level and the discourse gap in legitimacy and gender will be examined by performing linear regression and multilevel regression analyses.