Distinction and Presentation with #guiltypleasure

Guilty pleasure is a manner by which people can legitimacy appropriate ‘bad’ popular culture without losing face. As a style of consumption, guilty pleasures, enable consumers to cross and uphold symbolic boundaries between their ‘real’ taste and ‘bad’ taste. By using the phrase, consumers are able to pursue distinction between themselves and the product and between those who consume the product seriously. By analyzing 9605 tweets, this research combined the theoretical concepts of distinction (Pierre Bourdieu, 1984) and presentation (Erving Goffman, 1959), to uncover how Twitter users apply guilty pleasures to present their taste. Sharing your guilty pleasure on Twitter is a contradiction. The phrase entails that the Twitter user is embarrassed about the consumption, but by publicly displaying a guilty pleasure the product is elevated and given attention. By distancing themselves from a guilty pleasure product through communicating how they consume it, Twitter users are able to enjoy popular culture without endangering their ‘real’ taste and desired identity. This performance helps consumers to maintain the impression of ‘good’ taste in the presence their imagined online audience. The following research question is addressed: In what ways do people present their guilty pleasures on Twitter about different cultural products and practices and how do they aim to distinguish themselves? This question is answered with a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of tweets. Tweets were gathered by using the sampling technique of the constructed week. After the data cleaning, 9605 tweets were analyzed by using topic modeling (LDA), topic browsers, semantic networks and frequently used nouns, adjectives and hashtags. The analysis is done on the complete sample and several different content categories, that were created by coding all the tweets with AmCAT. As a results, this research identified three strategies to present a guilty pleasure and create distinction: distancing by describing the product, distancing by using time and distancing by attitude. Additionally, this research found three main types of attitudes: defensive, offensive and the confessional presentation. The findings are presented in a tentative model. The research concludes by summarizing the main findings, contributions and suggestions for future research.