Media and Political Engagement - Assetsassets.cambridge.org/97805215/27897/frontmatter/9780521527897... · Media and Political Engagement ... ‘‘Internet, public spheres and political

Media and Political Engagement

One of the most difficult problems facing Western democracy today isthe decline in citizens’ political engagement. There are many elementsthat contribute to this, including fundamental socio-cultural changes.This book summarizes these contexts and situates itself within them,while focusing on the media’s key role in shaping the character of civicengagement. In particular, it examines the new interactive electronicmedia in terms of their civic potential. Looking at the evolution of themedia landscape, the book interrogates key notions such as citizenship,public sphere, agency, identity, deliberation, and practice and offers amultidimensional analytic framework called ‘‘civic cultures.’’ Thisframework is then applied to several settings, including television, pop-ular culture, journalism, the EU, and global activism, to illuminate therole of the media in deflecting and enhancing political engagement, aswell as in contributing to new forms of political involvement and newunderstandings of what constitutes the political.

Peter Dahlgren is Professor of Media and Communication Studies atLundUniversity, Sweden.He has also taught at StockholmUniversity, aswell as at Queens College and Fordham University in New York City,and has been a visiting scholar at several other universities. He is theauthor of many articles and author or editor of several books, includingTelevision and the Public Sphere (1995) and Young Citizens and NewMedia: Learning for Democratic Participation (2007).

© Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press978-0-521-52789-7 - Media and Political Engagement: Citizens, Communication, andDemocracyPeter DahlgrenFrontmatterMore information

http://www.cambridge.org/9780521527897

http://www.cambridge.org


COMMUNICATION, SOCIETY AND POLITICS

Editors

W. Lance Bennett, University of Washington

Robert M. Entman, The George Washington University

Editorial Advisory Board

Scott Althaus, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Larry M. Bartels, Princeton University

Jay G. Blumler, Emeritus, University of Leeds

Daniel Dayan, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris

Doris A. Graber, University of Illinois at Chicago

Regina Lawrence, Louisiana State University

Paolo Mancini, Universita di Perugia

Pippa Norris, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Barbara Pfetsch, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fur Sozialforschung

Philip Schlesinger, University of Stirling

Gadi Wolfsfeld, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Politics and relations among individuals in societies across the world are beingtransformed by new technologies for targeting individuals and sophisticatedmethods for shaping personalized messages. The new technologies challengeboundaries of many kinds – between news, information, entertainment, andadvertising; between media, with the arrival of the World Wide Web; and evenbetween nations. Communication, Society and Politics probes the political andsocial impacts of these new communication systems in national, comparative,and global perspectives.

Tit les in the ser ies

C. Edwin Baker, Media, Markets, and DemocracyC. Edwin Baker,Media Concentration and Democracy: Why Ownership MattersW. Lance Bennett and Robert M. Entman, eds., Mediated Politics: Communi-

cation in the Future of Democracy

Continued after the Index






Media and Political EngagementCITIZENS, COMMUNICATION, AND DEMOCRACY

Peter DahlgrenLund University






cambridge univers ity press

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi

Cambridge University Press

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA

www.cambridge.org

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521527897

� Peter Dahlgren 2009

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,

no reproduction of any part may take place without the written

permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2009

Printed in the United States of America

A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Dahlgren, Peter, 1946–

Media and political engagement : citizens, communication, and democracy / Peter Dahlgren.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-521-82101-8 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-521-52789-7 (pbk.)

1. Political participation. 2. Democracy. 3. Mass media – Political aspects.

4. Digital media – Political aspects. 5. Online social networks – Political aspects. I. Title.

JF799.D25 2009

323#.042–dc22 2008012059

ISBN 978-0-521-82101-8 hardback

ISBN 978-0-521-52789-7 paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for

external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee

that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Information

regarding prices, travel timetables, and other factual information given in this work are accurate at

the time of first printing, but Cambridge University Press does not guarantee the accuracy of such

information thereafter.






Contents

Preface page ix

Introduction 1

Protean Democracy 2

The Media Connection 2

Useful Theories 3

Democracy and the Media: Three Traditions 4

The Chapters Ahead 6

A Note on Terminology 10

1 Democracy in Difficult Times 12

Elusive Engagement 13

Structural Snapshots 14

Socio-Cultural Turbulence 26

Civic Regeneration: Two Fronts 30

2 Media Alterations 34

The Evolving Media Landscape 35

The Twilight of Journalism? 41

Political Communication in Flux 48

The Late Modern Media: Logics of the Matrix 52

3 Citizens and Agency 57

Citizenship: An Expansive Terrain 58

Becoming Citizens, Doing Citizenship 68

The Knowledge Problem: Opinions and Experts 76

4 Engagement, Deliberation, and Performance 80

Democracy, Engagement, and Passion 80

Deliberative Democracy – and Its Limits 86

Civic Agency as Agonistic Performance 97

vii






5 Civic Cultures: An Analytic Frame 102

A Dynamic Circuit 102

Knowledge: Active Appropriation 108

Values: Substantive and Procedural 110

Trust: Optimal and Directed 112

Spaces: Communicative Access and Contexts of Action 114

Practices: Embodied Agency and Skills 116

Identities: Heterogeneity, Empowerment, Community 118

Civic Cultures, Networks, and the Media Matrix 123

6 Television and Popular Public Spheres 126

Television Logic and the Civic Ideal 127

Popular Engagement: Locating Democracy 136

Television, Popular Culture, and Civic Culture 141

7 Internet and Civic Potential 149

Taking Stock of the Net: Civic Horizons 150

Public Spheres Online: Social Contexts and Media Logic 159

8 Online Practices and Civic Cultures 172

Journalism Transformed – To a Degree 172

NGOs as Civic EU Networks 181

Online Activism: Global Horizons 190

Media Generations 200

References 203

Index 229

viii

Contents






Preface

I feel privileged to have access to so many generous and inspiring col-leagues, and to be able to encounter them in different contexts; this bookhas received lots of assistance along the way for which I wish to expressmy gratitude. Someof this help has been in collective settings forwhich itbecomes impossible to name all names, butmy appreciation is in nowaydiminished.

My institutional home base, Media and Communication Studies atLundUniversity in Sweden, is a small but highly dynamic unit headed byGunilla Jarlbro, where the atmosphere of collegial support and solidarityis really terrific. I am grateful to our doctoral students for the climate ofconstructive critique that they help generate, as well as for specific feed-back on texts I have put forward.

Two recent experiences as a visiting scholar were particularly reward-ing in the writing of the book. First, I want to express my thanks tol’Institute Francxais de Presse, at l’Universite de Paris II, headed byJosiane Jouet. Secondly, the manuscript was finished while I was inthe visiting scholars program in Communication and Culture at theAnnenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania,organized by Barbie Zelizer; access to that intellectual environmentwas a tremendous asset, for which I am very grateful.

I was fortunate to participate in the network program ‘‘ChangingMedia, Changing Europe,’’ financed by the European Science Founda-tion, which afforded many fine opportunities for discussions central tothe themes of this book.

Participation in the Euricom colloquia in Piran, hosted by SlavkoSplichal, has offered inspiration in a splendid setting.

The European Network for Doctoral Studies in Communication andMedia, which has recently become the Young Scholars Network within

ix






the new European Communication Research and Education Associa-tion (ECREA), has in its various guises over the past years offered livelysummer encounters. I am most appreciative to the past and presentcoordinators and participants of these gatherings.The institutional exchange program between Lund University and,

first, l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and then l’Univer-site de Paris III, funded by the Swedish Foundation for InternationalCooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT), has helpedput me in touch with French colleagues and with an environment thathas helped to expand my horizons.The recently completed research project on Young Citizens and New

Media was funded by the LearnIT research school (part of the Knowl-edge Foundation of Sweden) in Sweden, under the direction of RogerSaljo. This funding has greatly facilitatedmywork.My research associatein that project, Tobias Olsson, and I have been shuttling ideas and textsback and forth to the point that it becomes very difficult to specify whichideas derive from whom; he deserves much thanks. I am currentlyinvolved in an EU sixth frame project, CIVICWEB, headed by DavidBuckingham, that offers a new and rewarding context.I have also benefited from feedback in various forms from the following

colleagues:MariaBakardjieva,ElizabethBird,KeesBrants,BartCammaerts,Nico Carpentier, Daniel Cefaı, Stephen Coleman, John Corner, Nick Coul-dry, Lincoln Dahlberg, Daniel Dayan, Kristian Feigelsen, Beatrice Fleury,Jostein Gripsrud, Micheal Gurevitch, Joke Hermes, Klaus Bruhn Jensen,Sonia Livingstone, Brian Loader, Denis McQuail, Fredrik Miegel, LarsNord, Louis Quere, Phillip Schlesinger, Eugenia Siapera, Katarina Sjoberg,Jesper Stromback, Jacques Walter, Janet Wasko, and Lennart Weibull.It was W. Lance Bennett, one of this series’ editors at Cambridge

University Press, who originally proposed that I write this book. I havebenefited greatly from his encouragement and support.Karin, Max, and Finn confirm to me that the civic domain is not the

only one for meaningful engagement.Thank you all; the book’s inadequacies are of course all my own

invention.I gratefully acknowledge the permission to use materials in this book

that have been previously published in different forms (English languagefirst publications), as follows:

‘‘Civic identity and net activism: The frame of radical democ-racy.’’ In Lincoln Dahlberg and Eugenia Siapera, eds. Radical

Preface

x






Democracy and the Internet. London: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 55–72, 2007.

‘‘Doing citizenship: The cultural origins of civic agency in the publicsphere.’’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 9(3): 267–286, 2006.

‘‘Internet, public spheres and political communication: Dispersionand deliberation.’’ Political Communication 22(2): 147–162, 2005.

‘‘Television, public spheres, and civic cultures.’’ In Janet Wasko,ed. A Companion to Television. London: Blackwell, pp. 411–432,2005.

‘‘The public sphere: Linking the media and civic cultures.’’ In MihaiComan and Eric Rothebuhler, eds. Media Anthropology. London:Sage, pp. 218–327, 2005.

‘‘Political communication in a changing world’’ (with Michael Gur-evitch). In James Curran and Michael Gurevitch, eds.Mass Mediaand Society 4th ed. London: Edward Arnold, pp. 375–393, 2005.

‘‘Theory, boundaries, and political communication: The uses ofdisparity.’’ European Journal of Communication 19(1): 7–19, 2004.

‘‘Reconfiguring civic culture in the new media milieu.’’ In JohnCorner and Dick Pels, eds. Media and the Restyling of Politics:Consumerism, Celebrity and Cynicism. London: Sage, pp. 151–170, 2003.

‘‘In search of the talkative public: Media, deliberative democracy andcivic culture.’’ Javnost/The Public 9(3): 5–26, 2002.

‘‘Media, citizens and civic culture.’’ In M. Gurevitch and J. Curran,eds. Mass Media and Society 3rd ed. London: Edward Arnold,pp. 310–328, 2000.

xi

Preface






Documents

Media and Political Engagement - Assetsassets.cambridge.org/97805215/27897/frontmatter/9780521527897... · Media and Political Engagement ... ‘‘Internet, public spheres and political