On the Fringe

: indistinction and intramediation in online audience reviewing

Abstract

This thesis investigates how audience reviewing online proceeds as a social practice, and how this might relate to the cultural intermediation performed by art critics, understood as influencing culture through the application of capital and dispositions to struggle for symbolic power (Bourdieu 1984, 1993). Through qualitative case study, I use Bourdieu’s (1977) theory of practice to examine how the phenomenon is produced in the relationship of field and habitus, enabling its comparison to cultural intermediation. I observe the practice as manifest in reviews and other artefacts produced by users of four websites serving the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. I analyse these data in three phases: First, I examine field dimensions and materialities which might enable or constrain agents as they ‘play’ the field’s symbolic game for distinction (Bourdieu 1993). Here, I find agents are structured in intramediary, weakly symbolic positions on the field fringe, among many other similarly legitimised consumers. Secondly, I examine whether and how agents might assert more competitive field positions. With website profile data, I typologise agents by the capital they claim, finding the majority declare little and instead buttress their intramediary position. The third focus is how agent habitus is manifest in performances of reviewing and expressions of taste. Here, I find incomplete understandings of reviewing, and tastes which do not distinguish agents as cultural meaning makers. I characterise their practice logic as one of indistinction, or acting to maintain minimal, intramediary position. In combination, intramediary position and indistinction logic produce the practice of intramediation, or cultural communication by weakly empowered consumers, who do not engage in the field’s symbolic game. I conclude online audience reviewing of the Fringe is not the same as the symbolic intermediation produced in critics’ struggle for capital and field distinction (Bourdieu 1993).

Date of Award	4 Jul 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of St Andrews
Supervisor	Shiona Chillas (Supervisor), Barbara Townley (Supervisor) & John Fitzgerald Desmond (Supervisor)