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Media Consumption and Public Connection: Toward a Typology of the Dispersed Citizen
Abstract
This paper explores the nature and extent of citizens' connection to public space through media consumption. It reports on a study of data from two qualitative sources: panel responses and individual in-depth interviews. The authors' findings are, first, that people's media consumption and forms of public connection may be significantly constrained by limitations on their time—not just objectively, but also subjectively (their sense of lacking time to use media or pursue information). Second, such is the complexity of how people think about their public connection that research methodologies must be sensitive to the details of people's reflexivity, while enabling effective typologies of the positions people take up in thought and practice. Third, such research may reveal not a consensus, but instead a range of incompatible framings of whether public connection matters and how it can be achieved. Research should aim, therefore, not at a redefinition of something as unified as “civic culture,” but rather at tracking the hetereogeneity of the “dispersed citizen.”
... Un ámbito importante de investigación, relevante sobre todo para los STS, la comunicación y las ciencias de la comunicación, es la comunicación digital y las redes sociales. Desde hace más de una década, las personas que se dedican a su estudio han mostrado interés por la forma en que los buscadores y las plataformas de redes sociales organizan y estructuran la información que está disponible en la red y en cómo esto afecta a la subjetivación (Couldry y Langer, 2005). Las plataformas dan prioridad a ciertos tipos de contenido (por lo general, con base en parámetros de "engagement" o "involucramiento"), dando forma a un nuevo modo dominante de atribuir relevancia en la sociedad, que complementa las rutinas periodísticas tradicionales. ...
En cuanto concepto clave en controversias sobre la sociedad digital emergente, la gobernanza algorítmica pone de manifiesto la idea de que las tecnologías digitales producen cierto ordenamiento social de una forma específica. Este artículo comienza por los orígenes del concepto y presenta diferentes perspectivas y objetos de estudio en los que la gobernanza algorítmica ha adquirido prominencia, y que van desde el sector público hasta la gestión laboral y el ordenamiento de la comunicación digital. En todos los sectores, las controversias recurrentes, como la datificación y la vigilancia, los sesgos, la agencia y la transparencia, indican que el concepto de gobernanza algorítmica nos permite incorporar a una conversación colectiva objetos de estudio y campos de investigación que no se habían relacionado hasta ahora. Los estudios de caso breves sobre políticas predictivas y moderación automatizada de contenidos muestran que la gobernanza algorítmica es múltiple, contingente y disputada. Adquiere distintas formas en distintos contextos y jurisdicciones, y está conformada por intereses, poder y resistencia.
... By projecting themselves to the attractive natural and city environment shown in the film, movie viewers would include the site in their consideration set of future destinations. A film can help viewers imagine the available activities at the destination (Couldry & Inés Langer, 2005). As Lukinbeal and Zimmermann (2006) outlined, film geographies associate the spatiality of a movie with the social and cultural geographies of daily activities and renovate a real place into a fictitious environment. ...
The purpose of this study is to examine the halo effects of a country, in addition to the perceived attractiveness of scenes in a film, on the changes in intention to visit the site. A quasi-experiment by using an edited clip of the movie ‘Kong: Skull Island,’ which has scenery of the Ha Long Bay, Vietnam, was conducted for the study. Analyses focused on examining the differences in intention to visit the filmed site before and after the provision of information of the country to which the site belongs and identifying significant factors related to the halo effects of the country. Findings revealed that the ‘tourism opportunity’ factor representing diverse leisure opportunities perceived from the filmed scenery has a significant negative influence on changes in intention to visit the site. Results also indicated that country images on ‘attractiveness’ and ‘excitement’ act as a positive halo and result in consolidating the initial intention to visit the filmed site. Peer group influence which was operationalized as the anticipated number of acquaintances who have visited the destination country appears to be positive on changes in intention to visit the filmed site. Theoretical and practical implications with suggestions for future study are discussed.
... According to many studies, media use still goes hand in hand with socioeconomic hierarchies, typically differentiating between highbrow-oriented, critical news-driven media use and entertainment-oriented use, the former being associated with high-status educated groups and the latter with groups that have low status and education (Ørmen, 2019;Lindell, 2018;Lindell and Hovden, 2018;Prior, 2007;Scheerder et al., 2019;Van Rees and Van Eijck, 2003). On the other hand, media use seems tightly tied to the rhythms and time-use routines of everyday life (Couldry and Langer, 2005;Taneja et al., 2012). ...
Over the last 10–15 years, Western societies have faced two interrelated social changes: the digitalization of media and the increase in socio-political polarization. While their relationship is causally reciprocal, population-level empirical studies focusing on overtime change remain scarce. We adopt the temporal perspective on the socio-political stratification of media usage in the context of Finland, one of the so-called Nordic media welfare states. We ask whether the ways in which media usage is socially stratified has changed from 2007 to 2018 and whether there is political polarization of media consumption. We draw on two nationally representative comparative surveys, collected in 2007 (N = 1388) and 2018 (N = 1425), and show that the main media usage patterns—the wide, the narrow, and the Internet-focused media repertoires—differ both in terms of their sociodemographic and political profiles and that the opposition between the wide and the narrow repertoires becomes increasingly polarized.
... The concept relies on methodologies that foreground the meanings associated with habitual media consumption through the reflexivity of the actors themselves . Practice theory was here used to bypass an overt focus in media studies on either media texts or media institutions (Couldry & Langer, 2005). Couldry's (2004) widely cited article "Theorising Media as ...
This article develops a typology of anchoring practices of public connection to systematize how new forms of interaction, participation, and articulation in networked media now challenge the primacy of journalism to offer exclusive and authoritative representations of society. The first part offers a brief summary of core contributions and assumptions in practice theory, highlighting differences between strong and weak programs of practice-based research. The second part presents the concept of public connection and how it can be expanded to include media practice on a more general, analytic level. The third part discusses four sets of anchoring practices, which allow for very different intensities of public connection to emerge: practices of information retrieval, social orientation, (self-)representation, and public intervention. The concluding outlook section addresses challenges for the study of journalism, focusing on the relations between professional and nonprofessional practices of articulation, in which speaker and audience positions can alternate dynamically between different "layers of publicness."
... is digital communication and social media. Scholars have been interested for more than a decade in how search engines and social media platforms organise and structure information that is available online and how this affects subjectivation (Couldry & Langer, 2005). Platforms prioritise certain types of content (typically based on metrics of 'engagement') -thus constituting a new dominant mode to ascribe relevance in society, complementing traditional journalistic routines. ...
... The Internet challenges both the representatives and the voters and creates new methods of political communication (Couldry & Langer, 2005;Dutton & Shepherd, 2006;Gurevitch, Coleman, & Blumler, 2009). How does Twitter fit in? ...
Despite the existing research on how elected representatives use Twitter, there are few comparative studies and none that considers Israel, a country that differs from most democracies in its electoral system. This study has two levels of analysis. The first is the country level, in which the author compares and explains how representatives in four countries – the US, Canada, Australia and Israel – use the talk, listen and respond model to achieve their goals. The second is the individual level, in which the author analyses how personal characteristics such as gender and age, and political characteristics such as seniority and membership in the opposition or coalition affect the frequency of use of Twitter. Using quantitative data, it is demonstrated that representatives vary in the frequency of their use of Twitter. On the country level, Australian representatives use Twitter more often than their counterparts in other countries. On the individual level, first-term members, members of the opposition, and older representatives use Twitter more often than those with more seniority, coalition members, and younger legislators.
... Local initiatives offer useful contexts for e-participation (Freeman, 2013). It is at this level where the bulk of civic involvement in government takes place (Shackleton, 2010), particularly due to increased interest in issues of direct relevance and familiarity to citizens (Margolis & Moreno-Riaño, 2009;Couldry & Langer, 2005). The UK local government of Milton Keynes offers an example of ICT use to facilitate increased local participation in democratic practices. ...
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) offer opportunities for greater civic participation in democratic reform. Government ICT use has, however, predominantly been associated with e-government applications that focus on one-way information provision and service delivery. This article distinguishes between e-government and processes of edemocracy, which facilitate active civic engagement through two-way, ongoing dialogue. It draws from participation initiatives undertaken in two case studies. The first highlights efforts to increase youth political engagement in the local government area of Milton Keynes in the United Kingdom. The second is Iceland’s constitutional crowdsourcing, an initiative intended to increase civic input into constitutional reform. These examples illustrate that, in order to maintain legitimacy in the networked environment, a change in governmental culture is required to enable open and responsive e-democracy practices. When coupled with traditional participation methods, processes of e-democracy facilitate widespread opportunities for civic involvement and indicate that digital practices should not be separated from the everyday operations of government. While online democratic engagement is a slowly evolving process, initial steps are being undertaken by governments that enable e-participation to shape democratic reform.
... Para estos profesionales también las soluciones parecen estar más fuera que dentro (exceptuando las posturas pragmáticas de los directivos). Así como en BBC se hablaba de medidas concretas como escuchar más al ciudadano y ofrecer más diversidad de productos para un público cada vez más heterogéneo (dispersed citizen en palabras de Couldry et al. 2005), en TVE no aparecen medidas como tal sino más bien deseos ideales: desde el sueño de que desaparezcan los informativos del cómputo de audiencias hasta organizar desde fuera medios alternativos de participación social y proyectos de periodismo ciudadano. ...
Journalism and journalits face a crisis of credibility forced by their distance of the public and the access of citizens to new ways of producing and consuming information thanks to the new digital technologies. This article analizes the challenges for the public television media to legitimate their role as public media corporations in a strong commercial and competitive sphere. The study is based in 40 in-depth interviewes with professionals from BBC and TVE, and a comparative analysis of their discourses concerning their identification as journalists, their ideas about what means public service to them and the way in which they think of incorporating the citizens in the journalistic process.
... The communicative practices of local governments are therefore important spaces for democratic participation. Local government-run avenues for civic participation can capitalise on the fact that citizens perceive democratic involvement to primarily take place at the local level (Couldry and Langer 2005 ). The majority of everyday civic contact with government occurs locally, and citizens' increased sense of immediacy and familiarity with local issues drives political participation (Ellison and Hardey 2013 ;Shackleton 2010 ;Malina 1999 ). ...
Digital technologies and social media platforms are changing civic expectations surrounding interaction with government. Local governments hold key positions in the development of digital spaces for civic participation in the issues that directly impact citizens’ everyday lives. However, local practices largely prioritise information and services over reciprocal dialogue with citizens. This chapter explores digital civic engagement in Australian local governments. It draws from a nation-wide survey of councils’ digital practices to highlight that opportunities for civic participation are increasing, particularly through social media. However, substantial discrepancies exist between the digital practices of rural and urban local governments. This discrepancy is further examined through comments from seven rural councils that participated in a workshop on digital engagement, and the views of urban citizens (through focus groups) whose local government offers advanced digital practices. For the rural authorities, key challenges to digital development include limited connectivity, capacity, and financial resources, as well as the different expectations that citizens have in relation to social media use. For the (urban) citizens, participation in online spaces has gone unanswered by their government, which is creating a sense of disenfranchisement. While there is evidence of innovation in Australian digital local government, civic demand and government use largely fail to align. Councils need to reconceptualise current approaches to digital engagement by considering the purpose of participatory spaces and integrating their use into everyday operations. Moreover, greater government receptivity and responsiveness is required to enable civic participation to inform local decision-making. Such involvement allows citizens to develop a sense of connection with local government and facilitates increased civic engagement.
... This task is aided by increased knowledge of the needs and concerns of local citizens, existing infrastructure, and of the issues directly affecting the local area and population. Couldry and Langer (2005) note that citizens perceive democratic participation to exist primarily at the local level. The increased sense of immediacy and familiarity with local issues encourages active involvement because citizens can see the direct implications and relevance of political participation for their everyday lives (Margolis & Moreno-Riaño, 2009). ...
This chapter explores local e-government and the provision of online spaces for citizen participation. It highlights how different approaches to e-government development and implementation contribute to the likely success of participatory practices in informing decision-making and enhancing civic engagement with government. A comparative examination is drawn from the experiences of two local governments - the City of Casey in Australia and the Italian City of Bologna. The City of Casey's e-government prioritises service delivery, with opportunities for participation largely restricted. In contrast, the City of Bologna facilitates two-way online citizen discourse and deliberation, which is used to enhance public policy. This chapter highlights that institutional contexts, including insufficient policies and the understandings and motives of political actors, affect the development of participatory e-government and the use of citizen contributions in decision-making. It suggests that successfully facilitating civic participation and engagement through e-government requires strong policy frameworks guiding online content and applications, and a broader change in governmental culture so that representatives are receptive to civic views.
... Besides that general reasoning, media criticism was raised in other, more concrete terms such as the over-or underrepresentation of certain groups, values and norms. These findings correspond with the results of Couldry and Langer's (2005) analysis. Their respondents also showed high degrees of dissatisfaction with the media. ...
... Para estos profesionales también las soluciones parecen estar más fuera que dentro (exceptuando las posturas pragmáticas de los directivos). Así como en BBC se hablaba de medidas concretas como escuchar más al ciudadano y ofrecer más diversidad de productos para un público cada vez más heterogéneo (dispersed citizen en palabras de Couldry et al. 2005), en TVE no aparecen medidas como tal sino más bien deseos ideales: desde el sueño de que desaparezcan los informativos del cómputo de audiencias hasta organizar desde fuera medios alternativos de participación social y proyectos de periodismo ciudadano. ...
El periodismo y los periodistas se enfrentan a una crisis de credibilidad propiciada fundamentalmente por el distanciamiento con su público y el alcance de los ciudadanos a nuevos medios de producción y consumo de información gracias a las nuevas tecnologías digitales. En este artículo se analizan los retos que viven las televisiones públicas en la legitimación de su papel como medio público en este entorno de fuerte competencia comercial. El objeto de estudio se aborda a través de 40 entrevistas en profundidad a profesionales de BBC y TVE y el análisis comparado de sus discursos acerca de su identificación como periodistas, sus ideas sobre qué significa el servicio público y la forma en que conciben la incorporación de los ciudadanos en el proceso periodístico.
... Once interviews were conducted, the digitally recorded interviews were transcribed, evaluated, and coded in a manner similar to that done for the Frame Analysis. The researcher sought to identify the themes and ideas repeated or highlighted by the subjects themselves (Couldry & Langer, 2005;Harker, 2003;Steele, 1999) in relation to the overall theories under investigation, therefore producing inductive categories for review and comparison to the researcher's proposed thesis and hypotheses (Matveev, 2004). The three-step process included: 1) ...
... The movement of content across platforms is subject to a set of choices and decisions by these groups of actors, each pursuing their own imperatives. The optimistic viewpoint of empowerment can serve to cover up unequal power relations between these groups (Couldry and Langer, 2005) that come to shape the interface. Therefore contextual knowledge of choices and practices can help to understand how the (limits and scope of) action possibilities that multimedia networked environments (particularly the interfaces between platforms) afford different actors are circumscribed, and thus to understand how communication is encumbered. ...
A plethora of media platforms were involved in communicating recent protests across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), though it remains unclear exactly how these interacted. This qualitative article, based primarily on interviews with British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) newsworkers, explores the networked linkages between social and broadcast media, asking how social media content moved into broadcast news, which standards shaped the interface between the two and how these standards were defined. It finds that a set of normative and practical standards caused significant friction at the interface, which is reduced as content assimilates these standards. Standards are shaped mainly in response to broadcast imperatives, but also through the mainstreaming of social media and more efficacious and practicable networked communicative practices, indicating how power may shift in the networked age. Responding to the optimistic view that networked multimedia environments enable unencumbered communication, it argues that the scope and limits of communicative affordances depend on these standards.
... (Ardèvol, Roig, Cornelio, Pagès, & Alsina, 2010, p. 264) In this regard, talk of convergence may disguise what remain asymmetrical power relations. (Ibid, (Couldry & Langer, 2005). In any case, if participation is to happen, journalists and UGC providers will have to find shared models and practices that enable collaboration in the news process. ...
The 2009 protests in Iran and the 2011 Arab uprisings took place in complex and fast evolving media ecologies. The BBC's Persian and Arabic language services, which reach millions, drew heavily on content created by ordinary citizens to cover events. This paper traces the flow of this content through the news process to examine how collaboration between newsrooms and citizen journalists changed from 2009 to 2011. The article argues that participation in the news process hinges on the congruence between newsroom practices, and the practices of those producing content on the streets. Such congruence requires mutual knowledge of broadcasting requirements. It finds that by 2011 journalists felt more comfortable and effective integrating user-generated content (UGC) into their news output. Importantly, UGC creators appear to have taken on board the broadcaster's editorial requirements, making them savvier content creators.
... This argument has been made powerfully in relation to citizens under 18 (Buckingham, 2000). 13. Couldry and Langer (2005) provide further background on the methodology of this pilot research and the context of this response. ...
This article argues that, instead of assuming that we know what ‘cultural citizenship’ involves, we should investigate more closely the uncertainties about what constitutes the ‘culture’ (or cultures) of citizenship. The article argues for the distinctive contribution of cultural studies to the problem of democratic engagement, as usually framed within political science. It then reports some preliminary findings from the recently completed ‘Media Consumption and the Future of Public Connection’ project, which focus on the importance of social opportunities for talk about public issues, the possibilities of withdrawal from news because it presents issues which people can do nothing about, and alternative forms of collective connection through media (such as celebrity culture) which exhibit no effective link to public issues.
... It has never been easy for citizens to become informed and make their voices heard. While the Internet offers an unprecedented opportunity for people to access useful information and engage in civic activities (Bimber 2003;Shah et al. 2005), clear evidence shows that the new media environment is blighted by problems of information overload (Livingstone 2004b;Couldry and Langer 2005) and uncertainty about what to trust (Uslaner 2004;Welch, Hinnant, and Moon 2005;Dutton and Shepherd 2006). There is a need, therefore, for sources of interpretive clarity. ...
This article reflects upon the ways television changed the political landscape and considers how far new media, such as the Internet, are displacing television or reconfiguring the political communications ecology. The analysis explores opportunities and challenges facing media producers, politicians, and citizens. The authors conclude by suggesting that the television-politics relationship that emerged in the 1960s still prevails to some extent in the digital era but faces new pressures that weaken the primacy of the broadcast-centered model of political communication. The authors identify five new features of political communication that present formidable challenges for media policy makers. They suggest that these are best addressed through an imaginative, democratic approach to nurturing the emancipatory potential of the new media ecology by carving out within it a trusted online space where the dispersed energies, self-articulations, and aspirations of citizens can be rehearsed, in public, within a process of ongoing feedback to the various levels and centers of governance.
... The second aim of this paper is to extend the notion of mediated public connection by situating it in a transnational context. Thus far, most of the public connection debate draws on empirical work focused on individuals living within their countries of birth and assumes that there is only one public sphere to orient towards (Couldry and Langer, 2005;Couldry et al, 2007;Dahlgren and Olsson, 2008). This is, of course, inapplicable to most migrants, who routinely negotiate ties with both the homeland and the host country (Clifford, 1994;Cohen, 1997;Vertovec, 1999). ...
While most of the literature highlights the social, economic and cultural aspects of Filipino migration, this study explores its political dimension by focusing on the public connection of Filipino elite migrants in London. Unlike other types of Filipino migrants, such as Americanized balikbayans and 'low-skilled' labour migrants, elite migrants are expected to return physically to the homeland as part of their nationalistic duty to 'lead the nation'. From their interviews and participant observation, the authors discover that overseas scholars indeed maintain a strong interest in homeland political issues through heavy news consumption on the Internet. However, this has also fostered an ambiguous kind of public connection. On the one hand, elite migrants remain engaged with issues that they hope to address on their eventual return, but on the other hand they are not immersed with 'other' Filipino people in the diaspora. Their political engagement involves talk and mediated conversations with limited face-to-face collaborations with other migrants. This kind of public connection lends itself to long-distance particularistic communication and a great volume of discussion, but limited and short-term forms of public activity. The authors argue that elite migrants' practices of political engagement are inscribed in continuing socio-historical - and fundamentally classed - divides in Philippine society. Further, rather than enabling cross-class communications and connections, the media are frequently used by elite migrants to maintain political, economic, social and cultural divides.
Mostly based on primary sources (collected in the archives of the BBC and political parties), this chapter focuses on Party Political Broadcasts (PPBs): the mediating role they play in the democratic process, and how they evolved into sophisticated “performance” of political communication where entertainment is used as a persuasive lever to influence attitudes, if not behaviour. PPBs have borrowed from other television formats to develop into an innovative hybrid genre that is now part of British TV culture. In accordance with their public service mission, broadcasters maintain them as part of their duty to mediate between parties and voters, and act as a Habermasian public sphere. PPBs also reflect the long-term evolution of electoral campaigning, and parties are unlikely to abandon free broadcasting airtime with (almost) complete editorial control.
Populist and anti-intellectual sentiments pose a considerable challenge to science and science communication in many countries worldwide. One proliferating variant of such sentiments can be conceived as science-related populism. Science-related populism criticizes that scientists, scholars, and experts supposedly determine how society produces ‘true knowledge’ and communicates about it, because they are seen as members of an academic elite which allegedly applies unreliable methods, is ideologically biased – and ignores that the common sense of ordinary people ought to be superior to scientific knowledge. Accordingly, science-related populism assumes that the ordinary people, and not academic elites, should be in charge for the production and communication of ‘true knowledge’. Scholarly and journalistic accounts suggested that science-related populism can have negative implications for the legitimacy of scientific expertise in society and societal discourse about science. However, there has been neither a conceptual framework nor empirical methods and evidence to evaluate these accounts. This cumulative dissertation addresses this deficit: It includes five articles that present a conceptualization of science-related populism (Article I), a survey scale to measure science-related populist attitudes (Article II), empirical findings on these attitudes and related perceptions (Article II, Article III, and Article IV), and a discussion of populist demands toward science communication (Article V). The synopsis scrutinizes the arguments and results published in these articles in three ways: First, it discusses further theoretical considerations on science-related populism, advantages and challenges of its measurement, and broader contexts of empirical evidence on it. Second, it describes implications of science-related populism for communication and discourse about science, and proposes ways in which these implications can be addressed in science communication practice. Third, it considers how scholarship of science-related populism can advance social-scientific research on populism and anti-scientific resentments and could develop in the future.
This article explores how extravagantly visible mask-wearing relates with consumer culture. Methodologically, three purposively chosen case studies of spectacular or performative mask-wearing are used to show what the face mask can teach us about consumer culture in a pandemic. First, a Daily Mail (UK) article in which an ‘elderly shopper’ is shamed for wearing a sanitary towel as a face mask is used to explore the politics of disposable commodities. Second, the multiplying portraits of people wearing masks archived under Instagram’s #MaskSelfie hashtag allows an examination of how consumer-citizenship is performed. Third, the presence of extremely expensive luxury designer masks, as evidenced by Rich Mnisi’s Swarovski-encrusted offering, is a base for considering how virtue signalling has become a platform for luxury branding. Building on these three examples, the argument is made that waste, selfies and luxury are modalities for a pandemic commodity politics that is layered over and into the scientific citizenship signalled by the wearing of face masks. Together these create what I call a ‘sci-commodity’ sensibility, in which the face mask as a technology has become integrated with the modalities of consumption. This has resonance with ongoing debates about the object, subject and brand in consumer culture.
The role of the media was critical during the election and it was further exaggerated since social media joined the election in the form of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp. Social media is now inevitable and found in every sphere of lived activities. Election is a live activity in democratic world. Everyone wants to capture the live activities including election, to know how and to what extent election has been influenced by social media through political contents. Social media emerged as a political tool and found precarious over a period of time. This chapter discussed the correlation between social media and election and how both are inseparable as well in spatial representations and interpretations.
This study suggests blogging as a practice has unintended cultural and political implications. It can be drawn from the data, derived from multiple qualitative fieldwork methods (2008–2012), that Indonesian women bloggers circumvent cultural constraints. Appropriating the private Bahasa Gaul, women bloggers establish connections and make alliances in public. Further, the utilisation of modes of ‘street language’ in the digital age comprises a distinctive register of sociability, liberated from certain norms and hierarchies.
Video games are a $20-billion-a-year industry, but it is still treated as a niche market. The video game corporations hold considerable power over the articles that journalists write. Through in-depth interviews with video game journalists and by using the theoretical perspectives of Herman and Chomsky, Shoemaker and Reese, Shoemaker and Vos, and Goss, the researchers concluded that video game journalists adhere to an “ideology of anxiety” in which they mediate their work based on the perceived expectation of Foucault-like punishments.
This article responds to Thomas's (2004) call for investigation into how the internet and World Wide Web are changing government in Australia. It first discusses e-government principles and policies at the federal level, and then investigates initiatives and events in one of Australia's most populous municipalities, the City of Casey in Melbourne's southeast. The objective of this approach is to understand the broader context of e-government policy formulation in Australia, and connect this to the level of local government in order to understand the features and dynamics of existing e-government mechanisms. The evidence generated from this approach reveals an imbalance between service delivery and civic engagement in e-government strategies, with the emphasis on consumer-oriented service delivery far outweighing civic participation and political dialogue. The analysis that follows outlines actual and potential political problems flowing from this imbalance - or 'digital democratic deficit' - and offers suggestions on how equilibrium might be restored.
The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between news media and political education within consumer society. We argue that political education today needs to be understood as part of consumerism and media culture, in which individuals selectively expose themselves to and scrutinize various media representations not only of political issues, but also of political subjectivity and action. Individuals learn about how they might become political and act politically through their engagements with the news, in the context of the characteristics of liquid modernity, namely consumer culture, individualization, and choice. When examined through a lens of public pedagogy, political education becomes intertwined with consumer culture and the role of media in the education and socialization of political subjectivity. In this paper, we look at one example of the relationship between news and the education of political subjectivity by drawing from a larger research study, which examined the role of mainstream and alternative media in citizens’ political mobilization on climate change. We argue that news consumption is part of a public political pedagogy through which individuals negotiate becoming liquid subjects, that is, citizens who take a critical, monitorial, and individualistic consumer approach to becoming political and taking part in social change.
In information and media affluent societies, the critical ability of citizens is increasingly important. This is reflected in a number of political initiatives that aim at engaging citizens in questions of media content and production, often labelled as media literacy. In this context, skills related to media technologies that are often accentuated in media literacy education are a necessary but not sufficient condition for media literacy. Critical reflexivity and critical practices are crucial for media literacy and therefore in the centre of this article. This article proposes an analysis of media criticism from a citizens’ perspective. Drawing on solicited, open-ended online diaries as well as in-depth interviews with young Estonian citizens, the article applies an inductive approach to media criticism while paying attention to the specific context in which the media criticism arises.
Media and cultural research has an important contribution to make to recent debates about declines in democratic engagement: for example, is celebrity culture a route into democratic engagement for those otherwise disengaged? This article contributes to this debate by reviewing qualitative and quantitative findings from a UK project on `public connection'. Using self-produced diaries (with in-depth multiple interviews) and a nationwide survey, the authors argue that while celebrity culture is an important point of social connection sustained by media use, it is not linked in citizens' own accounts to issues of public concern. Survey data suggest that those who particularly follow celebrity culture are the least engaged in politics and least likely to use their social networks to involve themselves in action or discussion about public-type issues. This does not mean that `celebrity culture' is `bad', but it challenges suggestions of how popular culture might contribute to effective democracy. •
This article reviews the ongoing contribution of Personal Influence to our understanding of media' social consequences from the perspective of recent research (the London School of Economics “Public Connection” project, 2003-2006, conducted by the authors and Sonia Livingstone) into the extent to which shared habits of media consumption help sustain, or not, U.K. citizens' orientation to a public world. As well as reviewing specific findings of the Public Connection project that intersect with themes of Personal Influence(particularly on citizens' networks of social interaction and the available discursive contexts in which they can put their mediated knowledge of the public world to use), the article reviews the methodological similarities and differences between this recent project and that of Katz and Lazarsfeld. The result, the authors conclude, is to confirm the continued salience of the questions about the social embeddedness of media influences that Katz and Lazarsfeld posed.
This article investigates the extent to which young people use different forms of popular culture to express and make sense of their relationship to politics. We look closely at young people's interpretation of popular culture in order to find out whether, and if so how, it plays a political role, using focus groups and interviews with first-time voters in the UK. We adapt the theoretical framework and method used by David Buckingham in his study of the relationship between news media and youth citizenship. While Buckingham concludes that the nature of news media systematically alienates and excludes substantial sectors of the audience, we find that popular culture offers young people a range of often salient ways of expressing and making sense of their relationship to politics.
Cette thèse étudie certains des facteurs liés au développement de l'intérêt pour la politique chez les adolescents à l'aide de trois articles. J'utilise des données provenant d'une enquête par questionnaires, conduite durant trois ans auprès de jeunes Montréalais étudiant au secondaire. Le premier article examine le rôle du réseau social (parents, amis et enseignants) dans le développement de l'intérêt. Je démontre que les parents qui discutent souvent de politique sont plus susceptibles d'avoir des enfants intéressés par la politique et dont l'intérêt se développera. Cependant, le rôle des autres agents de socialisation ne devrait pas être sous-estimé. Les amis ont souvent un effet similaire aux parents lorsqu'il s'agit du changement dans l'intérêt, et les résultats suggèrent que les enseignants, à travers certains cours comme ceux d'histoire, peuvent jouer un rôle civique important. Le deuxième article aborde la question de la causalité entre l'intérêt politique et trois attitudes: le cynisme, l'attachement partisan et le sens du devoir. Il s'agit de voir quel effet la présence de ces attitudes chez les adolescents a sur le développement de leur intérêt politique, et inversement, si l'intérêt a un effet sur le changement dans ces attitudes. Je démontre qu'il existe une relation de réciprocité entre l'intérêt et le cynisme, de même qu'entre l'intérêt et le sens du devoir. Cependant, dans le cas de l'attachement partisan, l'effet est unidirectionnel: le fait d'aimer un parti n'est pas lié à la présence d'intérêt ou de désintérêt politique, alors que cette attitude influence le développement de l'intérêt pour la politique. Le troisième article aborde la question du développement de l'intérêt à l'aide d'entrevues. Treize jeunes ayant répondu aux trois vagues de l'enquête par questionnaires ont été rencontrés et leurs commentaires permettent de répondre à trois questions de recherche: les jeunes ont-ils une image négative de la politique? Les jeunes fuient-ils la controverse? Leurs amis occupent-ils une place prépondérante dans le développement de leur intérêt? Ces jeunes expriment une opinion très nuancée de la politique, de même qu'un goût pour les débats et autres images concrètes de la politique. Par contre, leur intérêt ne se reflète pas dans un engagement soutenu. Enfin, leurs parents sont plus importants que leurs amis lorsqu'il s'agit du développement de leur intérêt pour la politique. This dissertation studies factors linked to the development of political interest among teenagers through three articles. I use panel data from questionnaires distributed each year for three years to Montreal high school students. The first article examines the role of the social network (parents, friends, teachers) in the development of political interest. I demonstrate that parents who often discuss politics have children who are more interested in politics and who are more likely to develop political interest. The effect of other agents of socialization should not be underestimated, however, as friends were often found to be on par with parents concerning their influence on change in political interest, and results concerning teachers suggest that some classes, history in this case, can play an important civic role. The second article addresses the question of causality between political interest and three attitudes: cynicism, party attachment and civic duty. I investigate the extent to which these attitudes have an effect on change in political interest, and, conversely, the extent to which political interest affects change in these attitudes. Analysis of the data shows a reciprocal relationship between cynicism and interest, as well as between civic duty and interest. In the case of party affinity, however, the effect is unidirectional. Party affinity does not emerge as a result of political interest or disinterest, while this attitude was found to influence the development of political interest. The third article uses interviews to address the question of the development of political interest. Thirteen teenagers, each of whom participated in all three waves of the panel survey, were interviewed. Their comments were analyzed in light of three research questions: Do young people have a negative image of politics? Are they conflict-averse? Are their friends central in the development of their political interest? Teenagers express a moderate opinion of politics, often devoid of the cynicism attributed them, as well as a taste for debates and other concrete practices of politics. Their interest, however, does not reflect strong engagement. Finally, their parents are more important than their friends when it comes to the development of their political interest.
This original and engaging book investigates American television viewing habits as a distinct cultural form. Based on an empirical study of the day-to-day use of television by working people, it develops a unique theoretical approach integrating cultural sociology, post modernism and the literature of media effects to explore the way in which people give meaning to their viewing practices. While recognising the power of television, it also emphasises the importance of the social and political factors which affect the lives of individual viewers, showing how the interaction between the two can result in a disengagement with corporately produced culture at the same time as an appropriation of the images themselves into people's lives.
This arose as part of an ongoing project on ‘Visions of Governance for the Twenty‐first Century’ initiated in 1996 at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, which aims to explore what people want from government, the public sector, and non‐profit organizations. A first volume from the ‘Visions’ project (Why People Don’t Trust Government) was published by Harvard University Press in 1997; this second volume analyses a series of interrelated questions. The first two are diagnostic: how far are there legitimate grounds for concern about public support for democracy worldwide; and are trends towards growing cynicism found in the US evident in many established and newer democracies? The second concern is analytical: what are the main political, economic, and cultural factors driving the dynamics of support for democratic government? The final questions are prescriptive: what are the consequences of this analysis and what are the implications for strengthening democratic governance? The book brings together a distinguished group of international scholars who develop a global analysis of these issues by looking at trends in established and newer democracies towards the end of the twentieth century. Chapters draw upon the third wave (1995–1997) World Values Survey as well as using an extensive range of comparative empirical evidence.
Challenging the conventional wisdom, the book concludes that accounts of a democratic ‘crisis’ are greatly exaggerated. By the mid‐1990s most citizens worldwide shared widespread aspirations to the ideals and principles of democratic government, although at the same time there remains a marked gap between evaluations of the ideal and the practice of democracy. The publics in many newer democracies in Central and Eastern Europe and in Latin America have proved deeply critical of the performance of their governing regimes, and during the 1980s many established democracies saw a decline in public confidence in the core institutions of representative democracy, including parliaments, the legal system, and political parties. The book considers the causes and consequences of the development of critical citizens in three main parts: cross‐national trends in confidence in governance; testing theories with case studies; and explanations of trends.
- Couldry N.
- Hazan H.