Considering the Clicktic: Informal reviewers as mediators

This paper offers a theoretical and qualitative consideration of the interactive media-enabled consumer reviewer, i.e., ‘audience reviewers’, ‘critics’, and ‘commenters’ whose ideas about cultural objects are collected on the Internet as user-generated content (UGC). While some observers vaunt these users as disintermediators of experts, empowered by digital, democratic processes of cultural meaning-making (Benkler 2006), what do we know about the resources and authority these informal agents deploy to influence other consumers’ ideas of culture? The paper first considers how the conception of the professional cultural critic within the cultural intermediation literature focuses on legitimate cultural capital, field position and strategic practices as definitive assets of the critic’s work within cultural and social hierarchies (Bourdieu 1984, Matthews and Smith Maguire 2014). This perspective contrasts with literature in journalism studies, which theorises how a variety of institutional and non-institutional, amateur and professional agents online are ‘challenging and complementing’ (Kristensen and From 2015) traditional critics in ‘post-industrial cultural criticism’ (Kammer 2015). Of particular interest is a typology (Kristensen and From 2015) distinguishing four roles in terms of cultural capital resources and critical authority. This typology is then applied to empirical examination of consumer reviewers who contribute UGC to three websites concerning the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Analysis of contributor profiles finds mixed results for the typology and identifies four additional categories distinguished by agents’ cultural capital and institutional relations to the cultural subject. Labelling the largest outlier category ‘clicktics’, I discuss their characteristics and anticipate the framing of their online cultural production. A future phase of this research will advance understanding of the discourse generated within clicktic practices, while this introduction distinguishes them from other mediating roles reframed by digital disruption.