Being 'hip' is nowadays considered a crucial source of social prestige in the fields of fashion and music which are in a state of constant flux and revaluation. Being 'in the know' of new developments in the cultural field has consequently been discussed as an alternative to a status hierarchy based on social class as Bourdieu described it. In-depth interviews with young people deeply involved in urban culture scenes reveal a different perspective: They dismiss following trends which is seen as shallow, boring and too easy. Instead, their central concerns are authenticity and individuality. While the participants emphasize their openness and acceptance of other people's tastes, not submitting oneself to any set style regimes is considered admirable. Bourdieu's concept of naturalness turns out to be a useful theoretical approach that captures the kind of authenticity that the interviewees are performing.

When existing cultural boundaries seem to blur, people will look for alternative ways to express their identities. Recent research has shown that aesthetic dispositions (how one consumes culture) may be more significant than taste preferences (what is consumed). Sociologists therefore wonder whether distinction might be going underground. Elaborating on this issue, we examine the role of irony in cultural consumption through nine in-depth interviews with karaoke participants contacted in two bars in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, as we suspect that the ironic attitude is ideally suited to crossing cultural boundaries and, at the same time, to upholding class boundaries by distancing oneself from cultural activities that are considered enjoyable yet incongruent with one's identity. We indeed found large differences in how people performed and appreciated karaoke, which aligned with their levels of cultural capital.

Experience has been widely recognised as an essential part of an event’s success, but few studies have analysed the processes underlying the event as social experience. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the social processes which make an event a social interaction platform. The social interaction processes that shape the event’s social experience is examined using a framework which brings together co-creation practices, group socialization and interaction ritual chains. This exploratory study investigates the social interaction processes that shape the event’s social experience, by developing a quantitative tool, the Event Social Interaction Scale (ESIS), which attempts to pinpoint and measure different social dimensions of the event experience. The ESIS was applied at a popular culture event, the festivities of São João in Northeast Brazil, and 625 survey responses were collected in 2016 and 2017. Findings suggest that multiple interaction rituals occur. People who are more directly and actively engaged in the event are more likely to be open for contact with unknown others. The event becomes a multi-dimensional platform where different types of social interaction are not only possible but fostered. The ESIS contributes to charting the footprint of the event as social experience, revealing a similar experience footprint across different years of the study. The ESIS and the implications of its processes for the event can be useful for academics, practitioners and policy-makers interested in understanding and facilitating better event social experiences.

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Cultural consumption and the habitus: The role of knowledge and aesthetic dispositions The habitus is a crucial concept in Bourdieus theory of taste. In this article, we assess the relations between cultural taste or participation and two measured elements of habitus: aesthetic dispositions and domain-specific knowledge. To his end, we have analyzed a sample of 2,500 Flemings in 2003-2004. Active culture lovers attach more significance to the form of cultural products than to their function and are more interested in serious societal issues such as science and politics, but also in lifestyle topics. The results further show that these indicators of elements of the habitus greatly increase the explanatory power of the models for predicting cultural taste and consumption while their addition to the models diminishes the impact of more general socioeconomic background characteristics.