ARIN6905 - Week 4
CulturalIntermediaries
Today’spoint:
Culture and ideology are
transmitted through
intermediaries.
Authors, journalists, critics or
community leaders are
traditional intermediaries, but
how are intermediaries and their
roles affected by new media?
Image from the Fyre Festival promotion -
Influencers are a new form of cultural intermediaries.
TheContext:
Pierre Bourdieu originally coined the term “cultural intermediaries” in Distinction: A Social
Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979) to describe the way professional cultural workers
(journalists, arts producers) mediated between high culture and low culture to promote
high culture forms to the masses through arts journalism and cultural arts programs on
television and the radio. Nowadays the term is using more broadly to agents and groups
who amplify or popularise ideologies and cultures to widergroups.
Media scholars have defended that, in the age of new media and prosumerism,media
consumers and fans can act as cultural intermediaries (e.g. Manga fan translation,
bloggers, social media personalities, streamers, etc.).
Advertising
Advertising as a cultural product provides the individual
with the opportunity to construct, maintain and
communicate identity and social meanings.
Exercise#1
Ads are a one of the most intentionalforms
of media - everything in them is chosen to
create an effect.
Pay attention to the following Apple
commercial.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=70P7-pkyP4Q

Exercise#1
1. Is the product used in the ad? How?
2. How’s the life outside of the apartment in the ad? What does thead
tell about modern life/society?
3. How’s the product described? What does it do? What magic qualities
are imbued to it?
4. Why do you think this specific music, actress and director were
chosen?
5. What does it say about the audiences Apple was aiming toreach?
Advertisers as the intermediaries between
culture and capital.
Marketer
Advertising as a culturalproduct
“Advertisers engage in ethnographic research and mediate the social worldand
recontextualise lived experience within advertisements.”
“Cultural intermediaries such as advertising practitioners observe and interpret the social
world and embed these insights and experiences within the commercial texts they
create.”
“Only in rare cases do advertisements or brands ever lead cultural movements; more
often they are ideological parasites that draw from existing myths, and tend to ride the
coattails of other more potent cultural movements”
Client-agency tensions. Art-science divide.
Advertising agencies as ‘ideological intermediaries’
involved in the production, manipulation and mediation
of multiple meaning systems
If ads are a bridge between emerging cultural
trends and the wider public, ads and
advertisers live -and die- on how successfully
they can read and co-opt the zeitgeist.

The Pepsi AdFiasco



Exercise#2
In what ways the ad failed to mediate between acultural
momentum and Pepsi?
What could Pepsi have done better?
Are there any brands (or agencies?) more successful at
this mediation in this particular cultural moment?

How does New Media affect the definitionand
affordances of culturalintermediaries?
Fans as intermediaries (scanlators,streamers...)
Brands AsIntermediaries?
Digital Intermediaries?
Fragmentation of intermediaries - from few to many.
Aggregation of intermediaries and UGC - Rotten tomatoes, Google Maps, metacritic, etc.
Algorithms as intermediaries?
What is the effect of media concentration in culturalintermediaries?
What effects have this in media pluralism, veracity of information and accountability?
Remember from last week: social andcultural
references are notuniversal.
Thanksfor
theclass!

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