Cultural Practices and Socio-Digital Inequalities in Europe: Towards a Unified Research Framework in Cultural Participation Studies

Abstract

In this article, we propose a unified research framework for studying the impact of social and digital inequalities on four types of cultural practices: offline art-related practices, offline everyday cultural practices, online art-related practices, and online everyday cultural practices. In contrast to the research traditions that study them separately, we argue that the subject of further research should be the interplay between cultural practices in offline and online domains and that the impact of social and digital inequalities on cultural participation should be studied jointly. Based on empirical evidence from a large-scale research project carried out in nine European countries, we demonstrate the benefits of sidestepping what we see as a strange disconnect between the research traditions studying cultural practices and inequalities in the offline and online spheres separately. The results of our research show that only the inclusion of online and everyday cultural practices in the analysis does justice to the complexity of contemporary cultural participation and its relation to what we refer to as socio-digital inequalities.