Conclusion to Part III: Rejecting the Cultural Discount Hypothesis

Abstract

When analysing the work of the cosmopolitan amateur, it is less interesting to launch into a normative discussion of what constitutes a national or shared culture and what selection criteria are used to decided which products can belong to that ensemble than it is to observe how young people use globalized cultural contents to develop their situated relationship to the world. The number of young people whose “standard of good taste” includes openness to diversity is telling: international cultural products are the first aspect of globalization with which they have contact, as well as the first resource that they can mobilize to make sense of the aforementioned globalization.