This paper examines the emergence of new cultural tastemakers on participatory communication platforms, using the platform Discord as a case study. By utilizing Bourdieu’s concept of Distinction, it interrogates how platform specific affordances enable a renegotiation of authority and cultural capital in cinephillic spaces that centre around cult, exploitation, and fringe cinema. The Discord server, the server administrators, moderators, and the community are shown to act as decentralised tastemakers, fostering subaltern cinematic aesthetics while wielding increasing symbolic power in fragmented digital public spaces. This analysis applies Gibson’s (1979) Affordance theory to show how Discord’s structural affordances – such as server hierarchies, channel segmentation, pinned messages, and bot-based moderation – act as infrastructural agents that shape discursive legitimacy and cultural hierarchies. Finally, participatory communication theory (Carpentier, 2011) is used to interrogate how the participatory culture on Discord challenges the uni-directional cultural authority traditionally held by professional critics and gatekeepers. Ultimately, this study aims to rearticulate the politics of taste-making in the platform era, demonstrating how new actors contest and reconfigure aesthetic hierarchies. By positioning Discord as a site of cultural production rather than mere communication, this paper contributes to on-going research into digital subcultures, their decentralised authority, and the evolving field of media and communication studies.

Authors:
Arghya Das, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India
Padmakumar K, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India

About the Presenter(s)
Arghya Das is a doctoral research student at Manipal Institute of Communication, MAHE, India. His research is based around digital subcultures and their exhibition of transgression as resistance to the dominant cultural paradigm.

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