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Since much of modern mass or popular culture is of the pre-fab barn variety, it's not difficult to identify a longing for heritage-defined, community-based products or performances as a significant element of our overarching ethos. There are many thousands of examples of the way th marketplace has exploited this idea. Blue jeans connect with the "authentic" idea of real men doing real work; a Ralph Lauren shooting jacket invokes the "authentic" world of entitled patrician ease; a faux-antique farm table links consumers with the sturdy values of an agrarian past.

This, to me, is the sense of authenticity that pervades mass culture today. It is an idea that is particularly potent in our "thin" consumerist society, offering, as it does, the illusion of purchasable membership in networks defined by exactly the history and shared values that in modern society are available to very, very few.

Forget class versus trash, the elite versus the masses.

Divide culture consumers into four new groups, says an international study Oxford University researchers released late last month that will have far-reaching results for arts support everywhere.

"Univores," "Omnivores," "Paucivores" and "Inactives" are the new categories we can all find ourselves in. Which one depends on whether we believe Britney is a huge tabloid star or an area in northwestern France where Impressionist painters spent their summers.

But no matter what group is discussed, the visual arts do not figure very high on anyone's to-do list.

"Omnivores," the next biggest group, includes people who go to the ballet, symphony or opera on occasion while still buying lots of pop culture.

For purposes of the study, cultural consumption was split into three basic categories: theatre, dance and the movies; music of all sorts; and the visual arts.

"We are unable to identify any numerically significant group of cultural consumers whose consumption is essentially confined to high cultural forms and who reject, or at least do not participate in, more popular forms," says the report.

Status counts, not class. And status is defined by income not by culture.

In short, the very idea of "pop culture" is a misnomer.

There is no pop culture. Pop is culture.

Better education does little to change this bleak picture. "There is a sizeable number of people in this group who don't participate" in the elite arts, Goldthorpe says

Why?

"The short answer is, I don't know," says Goldthorpe.

We argue that culture is no longer localized in time and space, but neither is it non-place. Instead, individuals inhabit a physical world of simultaneous environments, of localized time and space as well as of multiple telematic worlds in which they can be co-present with others at a distance.

Yet, this still leaves some questions. To what extent are the sites of Starbucks-urbanism parochial rather than public spaces? And if they are mainly parochial, to what extend is that a threat to urban culture? Are critics clinging on to old, nostalgic ideas about a public culture? Or could new locative media ‘discovery’ services introduce new forms of contingency into Starbucks-urbanism?