The notions of a “mediated cosmopolitanism”, a “global imagined community” and an “imagined cosmopolitanism” speak of a cosmopolitan opportunism gaining ground in contemporary media and communication studies. This line of research tends to epistemologically situate human beings exclusively as users or audiences of media. The risk by such a media-centric focus is to confine oneself to the question of “what the media does to people”. By understanding users and audiences of potentially global media as contextualized social agents we engage with the relationship between cosmopolitanism and the media from a different vantage point. Our media sociological perspective insists on accounting for social context, and so we turn to the question of how classified social agents classify the contemporary media landscape as gateways to the wider world. What emerges in our qualitative and quantitative data is a pattern of social reproduction by way of cultural distinction – agents strong on cultural capital is particularly prone to approach the media landscape as an avenue for cosmopolitan socialization. There is thus reason to question the universalizing rhetoric pertaining to notions of a “mediated cosmopolitanism”.