Evolving Strategies for Media Communication in the Digital Sphere: An Analysis Through Digital Habitus and Network Gatekeeping

The dynamic interplay between media and culture necessitates a continuous re-evaluation of communication strategies. This paper analyses a foundational dataset (2022–2023) mapping the effectiveness of communication strategies—including interactive content, social media campaigns, and virtual reality (VR) experiences—across 31 case studies. Its novel contribution is a critical analysis of these data through two contemporary theoretical lenses: Bourdieu’s “digital habitus” and the concept of “network gatekeeping.” The findings reveal that strategic success is less a function of content alone and more a product of aligning with platform-specific audience dispositions (habitus) and leveraging distributed influence (network gatekeeping). This synthesis provides an updated model for effective cultural communication in a networked, algorithmically mediated digital world and offers practical guidelines for overcoming the limitations of traditional engagement metrics.