Rural College Students' Media Consumption And The Change Of Their Cultural Capital

In this research,qualitative research methods was used to conduct in-depth interviews with the rural college students and tried to explore the status of cultural capital and its changes through the media use of the rural college students.This paper starts from Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital and uses the concept of "habitus".Through putting the use of the media into rural college student's daily life and their growth experience,this research try to describe the three forms of cultural capital of the rural college students to reveal the cultural capital inequality in front of them and the change of cultural capital of the rural college students,as well as the role that this change plays in the reproduction of social structure.Through this research we found that the objective cultural capital of the rural college students is more scarce,because of their backward family economic conditions,rural culture and education before they go to the college,but this gap gradually narrowed after their entry into the university;In rural college students'family,the parents' culture is low and they have to be migrant workers,so they can't provide guidance on media use or create cultural atmosphere.Those factors lead to their lack of concrete cultural capital in the family,which also cultivate the independent subjective consciousness of rural college students;During the primary and secondary education stage,school will prohibit individuals' media contact in order to increase the institutionalized cultural capital of students,which limits the development of their specific cultural capital.Therefore,institutionalized and concrete cultural capital in the examination-oriented education presents a tense conflict relationship.This tension intensifies the inequality in cultural capital after rural students entered the university.This is reflected the complex role of Chinese educational system which promotes the social mobility and also reproduces the social inequality through the appropriation and selection of cultural capital.After the rural students enter the university,the cultural capital has been continuously adjusted,the concrete and the objective cultural capital has been gradually increased.But the power of the "habitus" formed by the early family and school education has been prolonged.The two forces of adjusting and habitus are intertwined with each other and affect the cultural capital of rural college students.Habitus is a constructive force of a structure,and rural college students show their rich creativity and initiative in the process of social structure reproduction through the adaptation of habitus.