Digitalizing Tastes

Abstract

This chapter considers the role of digital forms of technology as a final dimension that gives shape to contemporary cultural tastes. In doing so it considers some scholarship on the social role of these technologies and characterizes them, like the critics, reviewers and intermediaries described in the previous chapter, as part of the infrastructural and institutional architecture of contemporary taste which is central to the ways in which tastes are circulated by the cultural industries of the early twenty-first century. Such technologies are not considered as simply transforming the social nature of tastes and tasting as part of the rather breathless fetishizing of the new which often accompanies the theorizing of the Internet age. Instead, the means by which tastes are produced, managed and circulated in the ‘digital world’ are examined in the light of the theoretical and methodological perspectives on tastes described in earlier chapters, with an emphasis on the continuities as much as the evident changes. There are good analytic reasons for this position, beyond the inherent caution of any sociological understanding of the often glacial processes of social change in relation to new technologies.