From cultural democratisation to platform-mediated cultural stratification, explaining the transformation of cultural consumption in France and Poland

Abstrakt

Digital platformisation has fundamentally transformed the ways in which culture is produced, circulated and consumed. While digital technologies have significantly expanded opportunities for cultural participation, it remains unclear whether greater accessibility has translated into more equitable forms of cultural democracy or instead generated new mechanisms of cultural inequality. Existing research has extensively examined platform economies, cultural participation and digital transformation, yet these strands of scholarship have rarely been integrated within a comparative framework capable of explaining how platformisation reshapes cultural consumption across different institutional contexts. This article develops an interdisciplinary framework that combines insights from cultural sociology, cultural economics and communication studies to examine the socio-economic transformation of cultural consumption in France and Poland. Adopting a Most Different Systems Design (MDSD), the study draws upon comparative institutional analysis, secondary statistical evidence, European policy documents and qualitative materials derived from research on the transformation of aesthetic standards in digital environments. The article introduces the Platform-Mediated Cultural Stratification (PMCS) Model, which conceptualises platformisation as a sequential process through which expanding digital accessibility is progressively transformed into algorithmically mediated visibility, differentiated opportunities for symbolic recognition and new forms of socio-economic inequality. The comparative findings indicate that, despite substantial differences in national traditions of cultural governance, platformisation produces increasingly convergent mechanisms of cultural consumption
by reorganising visibility through algorithmic recommendation systems and attention-based market dynamics. The article argues that the principal challenge for contemporary cultural democracy no longer concerns access to cultural production itself but the
unequal distribution of visibility and symbolic recognition within platform-governed digital environments. By integrating debates on platformisation, cultural consumption and social stratification, the proposed PMCS Model offers a new theoretical framework for analysing cultural inequalities in the digital age.