The cultural shift

The academic field and popular media both describe a gap between the lowly and highly educated, concluding that they live in separate worlds. In the past 60 years a shift in cultural consumption has occurred. The elite in the 60’s, and thus highly educated, consumed exclusionary high-brow cultures diverting themselves away from the low-brow mass culture. The 90’s brought a new pattern of cultural consumption, the general trend being the inclusion of both low- and high-brow cultures. The highly educated became omnivorous in their cultural consumption and the lowly educated became univorous, initiating the omnivore-univore distinction. The overlap in cultural consumption could influence the segregation between the lowly and highly educated. To research this cultural shift interviews in the form of life history research was applied. Discussed with the participant was their cultural consumption and their network in the form of weak and strong ties over the course of the cultural shift. In the life stories of the participant no formation of ties was directly the result of cultural consumption, reducing culture to a building block of ties in existing social spaces such as school, work, neighbourhoods or sport & hobby clubs. This makes the ability of the cultural shift to narrow the gap between the lowly and highly educated depended on the heterogeneity of these social spaces and thus limited.