Bourdieu nel campo informativo digitale: la lotta per il capitale simbolico nell’era dell’eteronomia algoritmica = Bourdieu in the Digital Information Field: The Struggle for Symbolic Capital in the Era of Algorithmic Heteronomy

Abstract

Bourdieu in the Digital Information Field: The Struggle for Symbolic Capital in the Era of Algorithmic Heteronomy. This essay examines Bourdieu’s critique of media – centered on the autonomy/heteronomy tension – in the digital ecosystem. It argues the media field is not declining but restructuring: engagement metrics replace tools like Auditel, penetrating producers’ and publics’ habitus, redefining newsworthiness, cognitive dispositions, and reception conditions. Platforms enact a new invisible censorship by delegating consecration of relevance to technological agents, shifting the struggle for symbolic capital from broadcaster prestige to code, and collapsing the elite journalism/infotainment divide. The claim rests on analysis of a TikTok corpus tied to the March 2026 Italian constitutional referendum: mainstream media maintain structural dominance in algorithmic visibility, yet shares and reactions disproportionately reward activist accounts and content creators. Normalized indicators of algorithmic amplification distinguish digital capital from symbolic yield, supporting the conclusion that platforms act as infrastructures of consecration that redefine hierarchies among symbolic producers.