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Social Semiotics

ISSN: 1035-0330 (Print) 1470-1219 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csos20

Mediated Citizenship(s): An Introduction

Karin Wahl-Jorgensen

To cite this article:Karin Wahl-Jorgensen (2006) Mediated Citizenship(s): An Introduction,Social Semiotics, 16:2, 197-203, DOI: 10.1080/10350330600664763

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10350330600664763

Published online: 20 Aug 2006.

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Mediated Citizenship(s): An

Introduction

Karin Wahl-Jorgensen

What does it mean to be a citizen in contemporary societies? And what role do

mass media play in the construction and practice of citizenship? The work on

Mediated Citizenship(s) published in the present issue tries to grapple with

such questions and, in doing so, to complicate both notions of citizenship and

mediation.Citizenship itself has always been a nebulous and contested concept (cf. Lister

1997, 3). In the oft-quoted definition by T. H. Marshall, citizenship is a status

bestowed upon those who are full members of a community. All who possess the

status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is

endowed (1950, 28/29). This definition is both pleasingly simple and ridden

with conceptual headaches. For instance, do we understand citizenship in the

classical liberal democratic sense, as pertaining to the rights and duties of

nation-state subjects? That is to say, is citizenship primarily enacted through

voting in elections and keeping up to date with political information, andrewarded by formal civil rights and liberties? Or do we, along with proponents of

civic republican and deliberative democratic ideals, recognise the normative

desirability of substantive citizen participation in policy-making? More funda-

mentally, who counts as a citizen and who is excluded from citizenship? What is

the community to which the citizen belongs? Can we understand the concept

more broadly, away from the confines of institutional politics? For example, in

the face of globalisation, scholars now argue that we ought to also draw on

notions of cultural citizenship, or inclusion in a broader set of communities of

value. Adding to broadening ideas of citizenship are concepts such as sexualcitizenship and corporate citizenship (van Zoonen 2005, 8), which bring to

bear an increasing awareness of rights and liberties on a wider set of realms.

Questions over definitions of citizenship are not merely of academic interest: as

Lister (1997, 4) reminds us, much of the political history of the twentieth

century has been characterised by battles to extend, defend or give substance to

political, civil and social rights of citizenship. Such struggles are ongoing, as

witnessed in the increasing anxiety over asylum seekers, and the rise of populist

politics across Europe (see Pantti and van Zoonens article in the present issue).

They surface on the grand stage of world politics and in the fabric of everyday

ISSN 1035-0330 print/1470-1219 online/06/020197-07# 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/10350330600664763

SOCIAL SEMIOTICS VOLUME 16 NUMBER 2 (JUNE 2006)


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life, in the context of the competing rights claims and interests that characterise

the agonistic politics of multicultural societies (Benhabib 1996).

If the creature of citizenship is chameleon-like, constantly shifting to reflect

changing conditions, this is no less true of mass media. As Jones points out in his

contribution to this issue, any understanding of citizenship should take into

account the fact that media are plural*/that mediated experiences of

political life and citizenship take place through a variety of forums and types

of experiences. Jones suggests that scholars in media studies have been guilty of

placing news and journalism on a pedestal, while overlooking the political

potential of other mediated experiences. He argues that the study of mediated

citizenship has been dominated by three central but flawed assumptions: that

news is the primary and proper sphere of political communication; that the most

important function of media is to supply citizens with information; and that

political engagement must necessarily be associated with physical activity.Countering these assumptions, he proposes that to understand how citizens

make sense of political reality, we must first recognize that there is a profusion

of media, almost all of which carry some form of political content.

It is certainly the case that much theorising on the relationship between media

and citizenship has been conducted in a framework that celebrates traditional

news above all else. One of the most influential narratives of the relationship

between media and citizenship is Jurgen Habermas (1989) account of the rise of

the public sphere in eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Europe. Haber-

mas shows how, after the emergence of trade capitalism, members of the newly

formed bourgeois class organised themselves through discussion in public settings

to hold government accountable for its actions. The institutions of the public

sphere included face-to-face settings such as coffee houses and pubs in England,

literary salons in France, and regular discussion groups or table societies in

Germany. But it also relied on print publications, such as pamphlets, newsletters,

and newspapers, to facilitate a shared discussion among groups of people in

different locales. For Habermas, the story of the public sphere serves both as a

historical tale and a normative ideal of public participation in politics. He

characterised this ideal most succinctly in his 1974 encyclopaedia article on the

public sphere:

By the public sphere we mean first of all a realm of our social life in which

something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all

citizens. A portion of the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in

which private individuals assemble to form a public body . . .Citizens behave as a

public body when they confer in an unrestricted fashion*/that is, with the

guarantee of assembly and association and the freedom to express and publish

their opinions*/about matters of general interest. In a large public body this kind

of communication requires specific means for transmitting information and

influencing those who receive it. (Habermas 1974, 49)

In this formulation, the notion of the public sphere celebrates a particular

kind of publicness: one characterised by unfettered rational/critical public

198 K. WAHL-JORGENSEN


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deliberation on matters of common concern, and oriented towards consensus,

with the goal of holding policy-making authorities in the nation-state accoun-

table for their actions. Several contributions published here engage critically

with the idea of the public sphere, illustrating the lasting power of its conceptual

richness, but also the limitations of strictly liberal, modernist and rationalist

constructions of citizenship. Taken together, these articles point us towards a

new ontology of mediated citizenship. In particular, several authors question the

adequacy of conceptions of citizenship that reify rationality and impartiality.

Instead, they demonstrate that political engagement often comes about as a

result of passionate feeling*/that political life is essentially and irreducibly

affective (Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen, 2000). This is not to deny the proper

place of reason and rationality in conceptions of citizenship. However, it is to

question the opposition between reason and emotion that underlies much

political theory. Barry Richards (2004) has pointed out that there is anemotional deficit in political communication. That is to say, while the

dominant theoretical framework celebrates an ideal citizen who is rational,

impartial, and detached, we have much to gain from taking into consideration

the affective elements of citizenship. The paradigm of the rational citizen

might be neither normatively desirable nor empirically possible. Marcus,

Neuman, and MacKuen have suggested that emotion and reason interact to

produce a thoughtful and attentive citizenry (2000, 1). When we think about

what makes good citizens, in normative and practical terms, we must acknowl-

edge that acts of citizenship do not arise from rational, detached observation,

but from a set of strong emotions, including anger, love, hate, and a sense of

injustice. As Jones argues, an overemphasis on the medias role as information

providers ignores the fact that the citizen is also just as likely to embrace

political material that expresses, reifies, confirms, or celebrates the core beliefs

and values he or she connects to the state, or those things that affirm his or her

identity as a citizen. To develop a more helpful understanding of citizen

political engagement with media, Jones draws on a ritual view of media

consumption, examining how acts of communication facilitate a sense of

identification, community/sociability, security/control, expression, pleasure/

entertainment, distraction, and even possession.By paying more attention to how citizens actually engage with politics through

media, we can better understand the strengths and limitations of existing

opportunities for participation. Andy Ruddocks contribution to this issue

examines letters written to the British Conservative Party MP Boris Johnson

after he denounced residents of Liverpool for participating in a culture of

sentimentality. Johnson made this statement in the wake of widespread public

mourning after a local man, Ken Bigley, had been kidnapped and executed by

Iraqi militia. Ruddock argues that letter writers indicated a desire to see

themselves as parts of collectives solidified by sentiment and experience. They

did not feel that mediated politics create the symbolic resources to sustain such

affective relationships. Similarly, Pantti and van Zoonen highlight the need for

more nuanced analyses of the affective nature of political participation. Their

MEDIATED CITIZENSHIP(S) 199


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analysis of Dutch reactions to the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh

shows that although emotional citizens participated widely in the public

mourning, their actions did not necessarily create national unity or consensus.

While newspapers and political elites called for restraint and tolerance in the

face of the murders, they also generated strong emotional reactions of anger,

hatred and division, highlighting deep rifts in Dutch society. As such, the public

expression of emotion did nothing to revive or promote citizenship, either in its

political or in its cultural dimensions. The Dutch did not change their political

habits in any enduring way. Patterns of cultural inclusion and respect were

disrupted rather than enhanced. While these authors point to an increasing

sophistication of political theory after Habermas, demonstrating that mediated

citizenship is always-already affective, they also show that such emotional

citizenship must be critically analysed. It can both unite and divide, empower

and disempower publics.More than anything, the pieces in this volume alert us to the fact that the

existence of citizens in contemporary societies is not merely documented by, but

also reliant upon, media of mass communication. The media are sites for

struggles over political power, resources and interpretations. If, as Nolan reminds

us, the publics of representative democracy are performative, mass media are

one of the main technologies of representation through which these publics are

constituted and contested. And this representation operates in profoundly

ideological ways. For example, Emily West, in her study of the Medicare debate

in the United States, shows that even if consumer choice was the central term

used to describe the reorganization of prescription drug coverage for senior

citizens, the figure of the citizen was strategically employed by George W.

Bush to underpin his policy. Paradoxically, although Bushs rhetoric of choice

and the free market came out of a discourse of consumerism, his speeches

conspicuously referred to citizens and not consumers, cementing the collapse

of these two categories into one identity governed by individualized self-

interest. West calls our attention to the need for critically assessing strategic

uses of notions of citizenship. Certainly, while news media draw widely on

representations of citizens and their opinions, such representations often

construct a passive, reactive, and self-interested public that is simply followingthe lead of political elites (Lewis, Inthorn, and Wahl-Jorgensen, 2005). In doing

so, they set the parameters for public discourse and political action. Thus,

Nolans work on Australian debates about public service broadcasting highlights

how discourses invoking the public have concrete consequences for public

knowledge of events and issues, and the sort of political community this works to

support. Nolan focuses on the Australian Communications Ministers complaints

about the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) coverage of the Iraq war,

showing that they constituted an attempt to not only discredit (and thus

undermine) the authority of the broadcaster itself, but also to exert influence

over the way in which journalists themselves exercise this authority. The

ensuing struggle between the ABC and the government drew centrally on notions

of the public. Ultimately, the debate was a struggle over the meaning of the



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relationship between citizens and public service media: should citizens be

provided with a range of critical perspectives, as the ABC insisted, or simply trust

those who claim to act in the public interest*/in particular, an elected

government fighting an unpopular war? To understand how citizenship is

constructed through such discourses, Nolan suggests that is necessary to

disarticulate actually existing citizenship, and the institutional practices that

shape it, from critical-normative definitions. In keeping with this insight, the

work featured here is either based centrally on empirical case studies or drawing

on extended empirical examples of specific practices of mediated citizenship.

They show us that citizenship is both an ongoing struggle and a site of lived

experience. There is still a scarcity of empirical work tracing concrete practices

of mediated citizenship, particularly those that come from the bottom up. Such

work is particularly important because, as this volume shows, those who have the

power torepresent citizens from the top down do not necessarily speakforthemand their interests. Indeed, the idea of citizenship itself can be seen as a

Foucauldian discipline, employed by states to control subjects. In countries

including the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, immigrants aspiring

to citizenship status must undergo a test of their knowledge of topics such as the

organisation of government and the political parties, as well as of broader forms

of cultural capital, such as knowledge of major geographical features and, in the

case of Britain, where the Geordie, Cockney and Scouse dialects are spoken, and

how to pay a telephone bill. Such tests guarantee that subjects are normalised

not merely as political actors, but also as productive and compliant members of

society.

However, even if notions of citizenship are often constructed and policed by

hegemonic interests, media are also, as Simones contribution reminds us, the

primary locations for oppositional politics. In studying the womens peace group

CODEPINK, organised primarily online, she demonstrates that the Internet has

been crucial for the movements success: it has provided members of this

counterpublic with an indigenous medium, developed group consensus through

centralized organization and mobilization activities, and established access to

mainstream news media and the extensive publicity they provide.

A caveat is in order here. When we look at texts and textual practices, we areaccessing traces of activity rather than absences. This is a methodological

problem, but also a normative one: it means that it is extremely difficult for us to

access evidence of exclusions from mediated citizenship. We can look at

activists, netizens, media consumption, and rituals of public mourning, to

mention just a few examples. But we cannot see as easily who is excluded from

mediated citizenship, and how and why such exclusion occurs. Some of the

pieces grapple with this problem. Looking at the Chinese case, Yu points out that

the increased opportunities for open discussion through new media are not for

everyone, but rather for a privileged, well-educated, urban elite minority.

However, exclusions lie not merely at the point of access to participation, but

also in the concrete practices of communication that prevail in mediated forums.

For example, Janack demonstrates that participants on Howard Deans campaign



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blog*/designed as an egalitarian and open site for public discussion*/in fact

policed the boundaries of discussion, excluding those who did not conform to

strict requirements for appropriate conduct. In this context, participants only

accepted discussion on matters of campaign strategy and tactics, rather than

issues of substance. As such, participants themselves created a self-disciplining

system on the campaign site that maintained control over the campaigns

message and muted the potential for meaningful online political deliberation and

citizen participation.

More than anything, the pieces gathered here highlight the fact that the

notion of citizenship is itself infuriatingly complex, messy and problematic. At

the same time, they caution us to remain cognisant of the workings of political

power. Citizenship cannot merely be an empty vessel into which we pour all our

hopes and dreams*/or, alternatively, our nightmares. We also ought to retain the

principle that political efficacy matters to citizenship. Along those lines, even ifglobalisation and new media technologies allow for the deterritorialisation of

political action, the articles published in this issue remind us that the rumours of

the nation-states demise are exaggerated. It remains the locus of political

activity, and also of efforts at defining, controlling, challenging and subverting

notions of citizenship. In Millers evocative phrase, the nation is a oneness of

imagination that binds citizens to states, transcending the everyday apparatus of

repression (1998, 28). At the same time, we cannot take the nation-state for

granted as an uncomplicated social fiction. Rosie and his colleagues show this, in

their examination of how newspapers distributed in England and Scotland invoke

the nation. They conclude that the UK press is in fact a complex mosaic of

explicit and implicit national titles. While newspapers circulating in Scotland

constantly flag the nation, reminding readers of their national identity,

publications based in England are more likely to take Englishness for granted and

leave it implied. As such, any claims to a straightforward national British press

are oversimplified, and the imagined communities constituted through mass

media comprise an unknown number of attentive publics, only some of which

may be regarded as national (Trenz 2004, 313). Nevertheless, any contem-

porary notion of mediated citizenship must come to terms with the fact that

democratic societies exist in a globalised world, and are inextricably linked tolarger political, economic and social realities (Benhabib 2002, 168). As Benhabib

comments, the complexity of our social lives integrates us into associations that

lie above and beyond the level of the nation state (Benhabib 2002, 169). In such

a conception, citizenship represents a form of collective identity expressed in

and through civil society, where we function as members of local communities,

activist groups, social movements, churches, and educational institutions, to

mention just a few such memberships. By viewing citizenship in such a

sense*/characterised by various thinkers as cosmopolitan or cultural

conceptions of citizenship*/we dispense with national exclusivity, dichotomous

forms of gendered and racial thinking and rigid separations between culture and

nature (Stevenson 2003). The mediated nature of citizenship has much to do

with how such tensions between spaces of political engagement are articulated.



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Haiqing Yu provides an excellent case study of the complex mediated interplay

between nation-states, citizens, and a globalised conception of justice, in her

study of Chinese online and popular discourses over rights. She suggests that

although citizens activities are strongly circumscribed and limited by state

actions, there is an emerging rights consciousness surrounding the freedom of

expression in China, and a growing movement to exercise the rights of citizen-

ship, enacted through online communities that transcend national borders.

Together, these contributions show that the study of mediated citizenship(s)

challenges received frameworks of political, social, and media studies theory.

They tell us that there is much about both media and citizens that we do not yet

know. But more than anything, the contributions suggest that we cannot fully

understand citizenship without looking at the concrete workings of power in and

through mediated discourse.

Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University, UK

References

Benhabib, Seyla. 1996. Democracy and difference: Contesting the boundaries of the

political. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

*/*/*/. 2002. The claims of culture . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Habermas, Jurgen. 1974. The public sphere: An encyclopaedia article. New German

Critique 3:49

/55.*/*/*/. 1989.The structural transformation of the public sphere . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT

Press.

Lewis, Justin, S. Inthorn, and K. Wahl-Jorgensen. 2005. Citizens or consumers? What the

media tell us about political participation . Buckingham: Open University Press.

Lister, Ruth. 1997. Citizenship: Feminist perspectives . London: Macmillan.

Marcus, G. E., W. R. Neuman, and M. MacKuen. 2000. Affective intelligence and political

judgment. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.

Marshall, Thomas Humphrey. 1950. Citizenship and social class . Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Miller, Toby. 1998. Technologies of truth: Cultural citizenship and the popular media .

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Richards, Barry. 2004. The emotional deficit in political communication. Political

Communication 21(3):339/352.

Stevenson, Nick. 2003. Cultural citizenship: Cosmopolitan questions . Maidenhead: Open

University Press.

Trenz, Hans-Jorg. 2004. Media coverage on European governance: Exploring the European

public sphere in national quality newspapers. European Journal of Communication

19(3):291/319.

van Zoonen, Liesbet. 2005. Entertaining the citizen: When politics and popular culture

converge. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.


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Mediated Citizenship s An Introduction.pdf