Young peoples' sharing on cultural participation on social media: a fruitful venue for research on colliding online social and cultural capital?

As amply demonstrated, social media play and important role in building and maintaining social capital. Moreover, they support flows of socially embedded and novel information within their networked structures, not in the least on taste performances, potentially supporting the grass roots acquisition of cultural capital. In this presentation, we however focus on the prerequisite of young peoples’ online sharing of attending cultural events, exploring the explanatory potential of both socio-ethnic and economic background and psychological factors. This is important given the ample evidence of class attributes as distinctive in the access to and awareness of cultural consumption. Our presentation is supported by the results of a large survey, indicating young people from disadvantaged background to share more text messages, photos, and videos on their cultural consumption. Moreover, these activities seem both incited by clear intentions, next to habitual behaviour and social norm. The important prerequisite of sharing, confirmed in this study, however leads to ample subsequent questions. Our presentation has the aim to contribute to the research agenda by inciting further research on the extent to which the presence of such information from informal sources entices the activation of socially disadvantaged youth to build cultural capital by actively learn about and acquire new, not easily accessible tastes that might enhance social inclusion. As such, social media – reflecting structural social capital and containing cognitive social capital – might be considered emancipatory devices, or stepping stones, eventually supporting social change by constant encounters of otherwise unlikely obtained novel information, in line with Papacharissi and Easton’s (2013) habitus of the new