Cultural consumption and performance of taste: music heard (and shared) in digital media by young people of the lowest Brazilian state

Abstract

This article intends to bring to the discussion of the cultural consumption of young people an element that often appears in the background or ignored in the researches about the reception of certain products of the means of consumption: the way in which young Brazilians seek to adopt ways of managing impressions for the their social networks. In order to do so, we work with the concept of performance, associating the discussion about taste performance, in order to argue how the sharing of certain contents in digital ambiences promoting social networks is carried out in a strategic way, with the aim of giving clues as to how the individual wants to be perceived by their interlocutors and thus achieve a certain membership of certain social groups — beyond a mere personal preference. We present the results of two researches applied in the Northeast, specifically in the state of Sergipe, about the cultural consumption of young people from cities of the capital and of the interior, in order to reflect the way in which the cultural product choices, more specifically of the music, can give Indications of a performance of taste that would be based on an identity construction in the expressiveness of the social actors involved in the digital ambiences. Based on the results, we could consider that the convergence of the media has increased the individual’s forms of expression, in order to manage the strategies of managing impressions for a multiple audience and that connects through several platforms.