Producing Cultural Capital on Social Book Platform Goodreads: The Performativity of Reading Books through Achievement and Taste

Abstract

This thesis examines the social book site Goodreads, an Amazon acquisition since 2013. It is a platform where users can track their reading practices, leave book ratings and reviews, organise books on virtual shelves, stay up-to-date with friends’ reading activities, and get recommendations. Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural capital, composed of three forms: material, embodied and institutionalised cultural capital, is the main theoretical concept upon which this study is based, to explain how the types of cultural capital can be produced and displayed, and how the reader’s identity can hereby be performed. Other concepts, Lupton’s self-tracking and Foucault’s Governmentality are used to conceptualise Goodreads as a disciplinary technology. Instead of using self-tracking in the context of productive practices to govern and improve one’s health and body as aligned with institutional interests, the study bridges users’ agency in feature appropriation and the disciplinary self-tracking regimes that limit and restrain user freedom, and hereby, discusses ramifications. This study conducted a walkthrough analysis and its findings show that users can produce and display measurable and identity marking evidence of their book reading as material and embodied capital on their profile and Update Feed and gain social praise from it. Moreover, the study finds that Goodreads functions as an institution granting recognition to users through mediated signals like special titles and leaderboards. Goodreads is a data source for Amazon that uses user-generated content, in particular star ratings and reviews, for economic and strategic gain. This research project contributes to the general field of new media studies and adds to a more nuanced perspective of the term ‘governmentality’ in relation to behavioural agency, through the term of ‘cultural capital’.