Bourdieu's symbolic capital in the context of mass media

At today's seminar we had a discussion on Pierre Bourdieu's work exploring classification, taste, and disgust.  Bourdieu claimed that aside from economic capital -- capital in the traditional expression -- there are also social capital, cultural capital, and symbolic capital, which is the symbolic appearance of the three capitals above.  I think symbolic capital is especially interesting because it is somewhat different from other capitals as it is purely externally determined, while others are accumulated by agencies (people) in the society and assessed by certain social structure.

Symbolic capital, in my opinion, is how people evaluate one's economic, social and cultural status, or capital, in the society.  It is the means by which social class is determined and agreed, and the source of people's emotion towards classes, such as admiration, jealousy, and disgust.  It has been noticed by some authors that symbolic capital does not necessarily have a material basis, nor its evaluation follow any fixed rule.  It can be the product of merely impression, even imagination.

Therefore I wondered, whether recognition of classes in the 19th Century and earlier centuries is different from that in the 20th Century, which is an era characterised by mass media.  From observation it is apparent that mass media defines the taste of certain people and products -- e.g. Häagen-Dazs ice creams for middle class young couples in China. I think surely it has something to do with people's imagination of classes -- and their attitude towards those classes.

While in 19th Century the symbol of one's capitals are formed through gossips in saloons, today's symbolic capital maybe more and more determined by how mass media, especially TV, portrait the characteristics of certain classes.  An interest twist added to this, is that mass media themselves are symbols of taste and class.  We often consider one who pays attention to CNN and Financial Times as a successful professional and those who watch sports channel and read tabloids lower class people.  In this sense, mass media not only provided definition of class and taste, but also become part of the social structure that form classes and tastes.

I do not know if Bourdieu mentioned this in his masterpiece "Distinction", but I am really fascinated by this interaction between mass media and social classification.