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Audiences as Citizens

Insights from Three Decades of Reception Research

Kim Christian Schrøder

The moment one starts to talk about citizenship, one is also inevitably talking about political rights, political and cultural power, and political and cultural identities. Citizenship in a democracy has to do with being and feeling like the member of a political entity such as a nation (Anderson, 1983), and with being able, to a greater or lesser extent, to have a say in, and some power over, the running of the affairs of this political entity. In order to function as a citizen, one must have access to sufficient and relevant information about the circumstances – past, present, and future – facing the political entity, and one must have the right and the ability to participate in the public debates that precede political decisions. Finally, an individual must have formalized channels of exercising his or her power as a citizen, including – crucially – the ability to vote for the political representatives and leaders who exercise power on the basis of their being invested with the responsibility to ensure the citizens', or the people's, sovereignty.

In Western democracies, the media – along with other fundamental social institutions, such as the educational system – have played a pivotal role in facilitating the practice of citizenship for several centuries, by providing the democratic prerequisites for the citizenry. These prerequisites include supplying on a continuous basis the information that citizens need in order to monitor social affairs and facilitating a channel of public deliberation among the citizens, in order that they may cast their votes in an enlightened way in elections – which result in the formation of parliamentary bodies entrusted with the legislative process and the appointment of a political executive institution (government) (McNair, 2003). The media are thus the key guarantors of the democratically vital “public sphere” (Habermas, 1962), ideally a transparent informative and deliberative forum to which all citizens must have equal access.

A democratic society must have mechanisms for the continuous monitoring of the health of democratic processes, and – in addition to the media themselves – a range of academic disciplines have been entrusted with this task of monitoring. Communication and media research, alongside political science, cultural studies, sociology, economics, and other social and cultural scientific research traditions, has focused on the adequacy of relationships between (on the one hand) the institutions of the mass media, in their historically developing phases and their relative dependence on publicist and commercial motivations, and (on the other) the political institutions and processes – and especially on the possible consequences of the way in which the news media cover elections and affect their outcomes (see for instance Negrine, 1996, Strömbäck, 2008).

As a result of the division of labor within communication studies, reception research – a relatively young discipline, which has emerged around 1980 – has put the spotlight on what one could call the micro-processes of citizenship formation through the media, by considering, mainly through qualitative research methods, people's political meaning-making in their encounters with news formats in the context of everyday life. This chapter maps and critically examines the contributions of audience reception research to advancing our understanding of the ways in which the media have intervened in forging formations of citizenship for three decades.

While 30 years may seem a short period in the history of democracy, nevertheless this chapter argues that the three decades of reception research, while maintaining a generally shared perspective of mediated meaning-making on citizenship, can be seen as a succession of five shifting lenses through which reception researchers have observed and interpreted the media/citizenship nexus. These shifting lenses have resulted from the changing agendas of political landscapes since the 1970s, from genre and program innovations of the media, and from the rapid development of digital and mobile media technologies that supplement and may even supplant the print and broadcasting media.

The five stages are each characterized by the dominance of one lens of perception, while previous lenses have continued to exist and to exert their influence even as new understandings have emerged and become dominant. The stages proposed and developed in the following pages are: (1) hegemonic citizenship; (2) monitorial citizenship; (3) popular citizenship; (4) participatory citizenship; and (5) ubiquitous citizenship.

If we lean unpretentiously on the notion of scholarly “paradigms” (Gitlin, 1978), we can say that a stage is a paradigmatic framework of understanding, which at a given point in time guides reception researchers concerned with mediated citizenship toward relevant and interesting objects of study, the appropriate methods for studying our research concerns, the expected findings, and the possible avenues for intervening in the observed practices.

Each stage will be characterized by a detailed presentation and discussion of one or two significant reception case studies, which illuminate the scholarly and political concerns of that stage. On the basis of these case studies, the distillation of a historical typology will then be attempted. The chapter will end with reflections on the theoretical and methodological visions that influence the paths currently taken by reception researchers into the contemporary and future landscapes of mediatized citizenship.

Reception Research: Delimiting the Scope of the Analysis

Following David Morley (1980) – who operationalized his mentor Stuart Hall's theory of encoding and decoding (Hall, 1973) for his qualitative empirical reception study of the British current affairs program Nationwide (see below) – I define reception as the process through which “audiences differentially read and make sense of messages which have been transmitted, and act on those meanings within the context of the rest of their situation and experience” (Morley, 1980, p. 11). (For further definition of the field, see Jensen & Rosengren, 1990; Jensen, 1991; Schrøder, Drotner, Kline, & Murray, 2003, ch. 8.)

Today the landscape of reception research is still dominated by qualitative methods, although this dominance has become less dogmatic than it was during the pioneering years. There is a consensus today among reception researchers that methodological pluralism is often the best way to obtain explanatory power (Schrøder et al., 2003, ch. 17).

In the remainder of this chapter I shall map and critically examine the ways in which reception researchers have analyzed the media/citizenship nexus through five related historical stages. It will not be possible to cover all the work within reception research that could be relevant for the understanding of mediated citizenship. This examination will limit its scope to empirical research that has focused on news rather than on entertainment media (although the latter will find their way into the account of Stage 3), and to research that has adopted a qualitative rather than a quantitative approach (although the latter will be considered from the moment it makes its appearance on the horizon of reception research in the mid-1990s; see Lewis, 1997). Mediated citizenship will be dealt with in a way that epitomizes its “political” as opposed to its “cultural” aspects – since the latter would have required the inclusion of reception insights about cultural and subcultural identities and about the gendered and ethnic dimensions of citizenship (see Radway, 1984; Ang, 1985; Liebes & Katz, 1990; Jhally & Lewis, 1992; Hermes, 1995) – all of which exceeds by far the space available here. The chapter does not define or discuss the notion of citizenship separately, as changing understandings of this concept will emerge from the outline and review of reception research over the five stages. Readers who are especially interested in going into political science-anchored discussions of citizenship in the context of media studies are referred to the extensive expositions in the work of scholars like Keane (1991), Livingstone and Lunt (1994), Schudson (1997), Dahlgren (2006), and Couldry, Livingstone, and Markham (2007).

Stage 1: Hegemonic Citizenship

The notion of citizenship dealt with under the description “hegemonic” is somewhat different from the notions of citizenship covered by the following four stages. For instance the term “citizen” is not used explicitly by the scholars whose work comes under this heading: Stuart Hall, David Morley, and John Fiske. However, these scholars are centrally concerned with questions of political power, political identity, and the formation of political consciousness in a class-divided democratic society, as they analyze through reception research how it is that those individuals and groups who have managed historically to appropriate power over society's resources and social arrangements also succeed in holding on to this fundamental authority over the majority of citizens, whose lives are led outside the hierarchies of power.

It falls outside the scope of this chapter to provide even a shorthand version of the Marxist theory of capitalist society; but it has to be said that it was such a view that was pervasive in the intellectual climate of the 1970s in many parts of the humanities and social sciences, and this mindset dominated the first stage in reception research. At the time many political activists inside and outside of academia hoped to be able to mobilize the people – or the citizens – for the cause of large-scale political emancipation, through radical or reformist political action.

As a prerequisite to such liberating political action, the pioneers of reception research wanted to map the landscape of political consciousness formed by the mass media and to illuminate the balance between the forces of oppression and those of emancipation in the informative genres of news and current affairs programs (Hall, 1973; Morley, 1980), as well as in the entertainment genres of television serials and popular novels (Fiske, 1987; Radway, 1984). Here we shall concentrate on the reception perspectives of Hall and Morley, whose work engaged the realm of politics directly by tackling its representations in news and current affairs programming. The work of John Fiske used the same theoretical framework and was highly contested because of its celebration of the semiotic oppositional powers of the subordinate classes (Fiske, 1987). Fiske coined the phrase “semiotic democracy” to explain how ordinary people had the freedom to decode media discourses in a manner that was at least symbolically oppositional to the hegemonic powers.

The seminal reception research inaugurated theoretically by Hall (1973) and substantiated empirically by Morley (1980) in his qualitative study of the BBC current affairs program Nationwide followed after both authors had conducted extensive textual analyses of mass media content. These critiques of media representations demonstrated the massive scale of the ideological hegemony propagated on behalf of the allegedly oppressive social arrangements that victimized the working classes while seemingly providing an affluent society with increasing standards of living and with consumer goods (Hall, Clarke, Critcher, Jefferson, & Roberts, 1978). The crucial question for reception researchers in this sort of situation was: How do audiences make sense of such a partisan consensual picture of societal issues and problems? How do they position themselves ideologically in relation to the ideological position offered by the Nationwide current affairs program? The reception interviews designed to provide answers to these questions were analyzed according to a template that assumed that the program offered viewers an ideologically loaded “preferred meaning,” to which they could relate through a “dominant,” “negotiated,” or “oppositional” reading.

This matrix has since become part of the terminological heritage of reception research, along with the notion of polysemy (multiple meanings). Morley sees the TV program as “a structured polysemy. [. . .] [I]t has been structured in dominance, although its meaning can never be totally fixed or ‘closed’” (Morley, 1980, p. 10).

From this definition of the preferred meaning it follows that it is somehow easier for viewers to swallow the preferred reading, which is the meaning that, so to speak, offers itself to viewers as the dominant reading: viewers actualize the dominant, hegemonic reading when they share the codes in which the program was encoded and the accompanying system of values, beliefs, and assumptions about the social world. When viewers share the program's code in part and accept the preferred meaning broadly, but modify it in accordance with their own interests and preferences, they produce a negotiated reading. Oppositional readings occur when viewers do not share at all the codes that generated the program but draw on an alternative, politically critical and oppositional frame of interpretation.

Toward the end of the book Morley briefly relates his reception findings to more conventional forms of citizen behavior, such as party political affiliations and preferences in parliamentary elections. However, he is careful to emphasize that there is no simple coupling of each of the three reading positions and party political affiliations. Among the groups that take up a particular reading position we may find a variety of party political outlooks and a variety of objective class affiliations. At the end of the day, therefore, Morley's findings do not enable him to discern fixed and predictable patterns in the mediated social production of hegemony and resistance among citizens.

Stage 2: Monitorial Citizenship

Without abandoning the theoretical understanding of how a capitalist society reproduces its social formation through the ideological discourses of the mass media, which characterized Stage 1, at Stage 2 reception research explores news reception mainly from the perspective of how the news enables citizens to monitor their social environment, which is relevant for their ability to function as political subjects in a representative democracy.¹ Inspired by James Lull's pioneering ethnographic study of “the social uses of television” (1980), Klaus Bruhn Jensen (1986; 1990) wishes to draw a descriptive map on the basis of informants' accounts of their uses of TV news in everyday life. The theoretical framework governing the study is remarkably similar to the Hall–Morley conceptualization of political hegemony, which is largely assumed to be the study's analytical premise. Jensen agrees with John Fiske that the polysemic potential of the news text leads to differentiated readings, which can be seen as semiotically “oppositional” in the sense of diverging from the ideologically dominant “preferred” reading inscribed into the news message. But Jensen disputes Fiske's assertion that oppositional readings are in themselves politically significant – semiotic resistance is not political resistance (Jensen, 1990, p. 58).

Jensen's analytical mapping of the everyday uses and readings of TV news shows that the real political potency of news reception is negligible. Casting the news program both as an “account” of the mechanisms of representative democracy and as a “resource” that audiences may potentially utilize in forms of political participation, Jensen bases his study on 24 individual qualitative interviews with US male respondents to a screening of yesterday's mainstream news program.

Echoing Lull (1980), Jensen distinguishes four different “uses” of TV news. Unlike Morley, he finds his informants' readings to be closely associated with the everyday situational context in which these informants watch the news programs:

1. Contextual uses have to do with the way news programs are watched as a flow and “punctuate daily life,” often in the family environment and intersecting with gender roles and other power relations.
2. Informational uses occur when the news is watched for the “factual knowledge of political issues and events” that it brings to viewers, who find this knowledge relevant “in their roles as consumer, employee, and, above all, as citizen and voter” (Jensen, 1990, p. 66). Here viewers follow the daily news as a way to maintain a modest level of political information between elections and to be able to engage in trivial conversation with other people. The news is not used for genuine political deliberation in the Habermassian sense associated with active citizenship in the public sphere.
3. Legitimating uses occur when citizens are maintaining their political self-image by routinely following the news and deluding themselves that they are not too remote from the ideal of active citizenship. The ordinary news user is politically compliant. However, disgruntled semiotic opposition from the safety and comfort of one's armchair is widely practised.
4. Diversional uses have to do with perceiving the news as a kind of (political) entertainment that serves to “divert the attention of the audience, not just from boredom and anxiety, but from major issues of social conflict and power” (p. 71). Diversion may arise from two characteristics of TV news: first, from the parasocial appeal and charisma of the anchor people; second, from the visual experience of immediacy, human interest, narrative drama, liveliness, and so on.

Jensen thus sees TV news as a public forum (Newcomb & Hirsch, 1983) that enables citizens to monitor their society routinely, on a daily basis, but in a hegemonic manner that has few or no repercussions on the nation's political scene, a far cry from the active citizens conceptualized in Habermas' theory of the public sphere.

Asking what can be done to remedy this sad state of affairs, Jensen argues that apparently the sheer availability of politically informative news programs is not sufficient to ensure a politically enlightened and active citizenry, not even in the case of well-educated social groups, the representatives of which were no more active politically than their low-educated counterparts. For Jensen, the answer lies in a deliberate effort on the part of the educational system to teach media literacy: “Since the political process is increasingly conducted through the mass media, popular participation depends on a new functional literacy comprising critical comprehension skills as well as concrete production skills” (p. 74).

This educational perspective on mediated citizenship is shared by Justin Lewis (1991), but his studies of news reception processes led him to look for the solution in a different direction, namely that of the producers of journalistic content: they ought to compose their news stories in alternative ways, which would hold greater appeal, ensure better comprehension, and build more useful insights into political affairs among the citizens. Lewis' news reception study analyses 50 viewers' understanding of the British Independent Television (ITV) news program News at Ten, in order to map the way TV news enables citizens to monitor their world by bringing to them the prerequisites of competent citizenship: “TV news is at the core of any modern democratic system. The quality of the decisions we make within a democracy depends upon the quality of the information we receive” (Lewis, 1991, p. 123).

The findings “suggest that TV news performs, even on its own terms, quite dismally” (p. 152). This assessment is due to the fact that the TV news offered by the news journalists is neither comprehensible nor meaningful to most ordinary people. The gist of Lewis' argument is that TV news is not enough like fictional narratives: these have a tripartite structure – enigma, suspension, resolution – that catches and holds the viewer's attention and paves the way for the process of comprehension. The news, by contrast, “is a form that, by abandoning narrative, abandons substantial sections of the viewer's consciousness” (p. 129). The typical TV news story is inherently demotivating, because it takes a story and “squeezes the sense of mystery right out of it. [. . .] It is like being told the punchline before the joke” (pp. 130–131).

For Lewis, the solution to the miscommunication uncovered through reception analysis lies in the opportunity this provides for journalists to educate citizens, because, “if news adopted the conventions of narrative codes used in other cultural forms, it would be considerably more successful at communicating its message to people” (p. 138). This conclusion is slightly at odds with the findings of Goddard, Corner, Gavin, and Richardson (1998), who studied citizens' understanding of televised economic news that used personalizing narrative devices in order to make the often abstract economic news easier to understand. The personalizing devices did serve to increase the informants' understanding of the individual news story, but they did not seem to lead to a deeper understanding of the more abstract economic mechanisms of the national economy.

Stage 3: Popular Citizenship

While the reception research of Stage 1 and Stage 2 considered the ways in which sedentary viewers situated in their living-rooms made sense of television genres, the pioneering study by Livingstone and Lunt (1994) explored a novel and different program format, which gave access to the voices of audience members: the latter were invited into the TV studio to participate in debate programs. Such studio audience discussion programs were new at the time in a European broadcasting context; they resulted in part from the widespread deregulation and commercialization of television under the right-wing governments of the 1980s. Yet some specimens of participatory formats had existed in the US since the 1970s, notably the format establishing Phil Donahue Show; this program format also surged in the US from the late 1980s on (e.g., The Oprah Winfrey Show).

In the classic form studied by Livingstone and Lunt, British programs like The Kilroy Show, The Time the Place, and Donahue invited lay people, experts, and politicians into a TV amphitheater studio in order to debate topical and controversial issues, which people usually have opinions about and which may trigger talk and debate. The fundamental concern, empirically explored by Livingstone and Lunt, was whether such programs, often considered as a low-culture genre by cultural critics, could be said to have any democratic value. The answer hinges on whether the audiences that watch them regularly can be demonstrated to acquire significant prerequisites of citizenship precisely through the experience of watching such programs:

The yardstick held up by Livingstone and Lunt to measure the democratic quality of audience debate programs is clearly indebted to Habermas' definition of the public sphere in its ideal form. However, granting that public debate must adhere to agreed rules of rational argument, Livingstone and Lunt do not require these programs to result in the achievement of consensual conclusions that reach beyond the program and into the circles of political power. Instead, following the theory of media as a “cultural forum” (Newcomb & Hirsch, 1984), Livingstone and Lunt describe Habermas' requirement as “too stringent [. . .] for the present-day mass media cultural forum, which may more simply place arguments side by side without analysis or integration” (1994, p. 31). They argue that the value of the less than ideal public sphere of debate programs lies in their multivocal contribution (1) to a shared “contemporary version of common sense” (ibid.), which sets normative standards for human behavior; and (2) to the formation of people's political and cultural identities at individual and group levels.

The methodological framework for Livingstone and Lunt's project was comprehensive and consisted of multiple methods, which included focus groups, individual in-depth interviews, and, as an early example within reception research, the cross-fertilization of qualitative and quantitative methods. Livingstone, Wober, and Lunt (1994) supplemented the qualitative sense-making fieldwork with a representative survey of 500 respondents. Audience members were found to be very appreciative of the program's admission of diverse voices as a basis for democratic debate. In addition to this plurality of voices, the existence of a genuine public sphere also depends on the perceived equality of these voices: everyone – both people in authoritative positions, such as politicians or scientific experts, and members of the lay citizenry – enters the debate on equal terms. Apparently the programs were successful in creating this levelling of voices:

Livingstone and Lunt also emphasize the overall evaluative and discriminating stance that audiences adopt toward these programs. Far from merely engaging in debate programs for their titillating or sensational aspects, audience members deployed argumentative and evaluative aesthetic frameworks of interpretation to position themselves as public citizens rather than private consumers (see also Schrøder & Phillips, 2005).

These results are on the whole corroborated by the findings of the survey study concerning the extent to which these qualitative findings can be generalized to the population of the UK. The survey confirms “the viewers' skepticism about the authority of experts, their sense of involvement in the genre, their cautious acceptance of the genre as a putative mass mediated public sphere, and their interest in hearing the voices of ordinary experience” (Livingstone, Wober, & Lunt, 1994, p. 355). Remarkably perhaps, these responses were almost universal across demographic groups, only age being a distinguishing variable in a few respects: older viewers were more critical of the chaotic nature of the debates and more respectful of the experts. Interestingly, it turned out that the more one likes the program, the more one tends to see it as an authentically mediated public sphere, while those who do not find the program democratically enriching may nevertheless watch it in order to ridicule those who go on the show (p. 374).

In their concluding discussion of studio debate programs, Livingstone and Lunt situate them between the polar opposites of media content catering for “the public knowledge project” and media content catering for “the popular culture project” (Corner, 1991, p. 268). They stress that the traditional division between informative and entertaining genres on the one hand and the corresponding audience categories of “critical insight” and “mindless pleasure” on the other is not applicable to audience discussion programs: “Audience discussion programs do not fit into this opposition of information and entertainment” (Livingstone & Lunt, 1994, p. 179).

Other reception scholars have taken up the gauntlet of exploring the claim that popular entertainment, in its pure form, is inevitably detrimental to democratic endeavors. Pioneering this perspective, Liesbet van Zoonen (2005) presents an argument for the compatibility between entertainment and politics and against their separation, which in her view would only serve to aggravate the decline in political engagement; this is because in our modern culture, whether we like it or not (Postman, 1985), entertainment looms large in citizens' everyday lives. Van Zoonen's work is thus designed as an intervention with “an agenda to think about entertaining politics, instead of simply discarding it as irrelevant and dangerous to citizenship and the democratic project” (2005, p. viii; see also Curran, 2010).

Focusing her empirical work on fan culture as an intense form of audiencehood, Van Zoonen argues that “the behavior of fans in relation to soaps, popular music, and other entertainment genres is not fundamentally different from what is required of citizens” (2005, p. 16). Following performers and politicians respectively, “both fans and citizens follow their objects intensely, promote them to outsiders, deliberate among each other, come to informed judgments, and propose alternatives” (ibid.). And both kinds of relationship incorporate affective and emotional, cognitive and rational engagements. One should therefore acknowledge “the rational in fandom and the emotional in politics” (p. 17).

Van Zoonen also analyzes audience reception of films and TV series whose story lines include subject matter from the world of politics. Methodologically she does not base her analysis on empirical fieldwork that uses interview encounters with audience members, but on a fly-on-the-wall netnography. She observes discussion groups on Internet Movie Database, looking for answers to the question “whether and how entertaining politics enables people to perform as citizens” (p. 123). She concludes that the movies and TV series discussed by the groups

Therefore, instead of denigrating the political potential of popular entertainment, educators should be alert to its political potential, because the fictional personalization and narrativization of politics “may offer a way into politics for people otherwise excluded or bored” (p. 150). Such findings are complemented by Johansson's reception study of 55 readers of British tabloid newspapers (Johansson, 2009).

Stage 4: Participatory Citizenship

We now live in a convergence culture – a world in which, as Henry Jenkins puts it, “old and new media collide” (Jenkins, 2006). In the 1990s, when the Internet was still seen as a “new” medium, it was greeted with a mixture of utopian and dystopian visions: while the pessimists focused on its massive potential for surveillance and control of the remotest corner of human life, the optimists welcomed the Internet as a technology that would revolutionize all areas of cultural life, leading toward a new participatory public sphere in the realm of politics and innovating the world of education through new collaborative and creative ways of learning. Practices of “collective intelligence” and “collective creativity” would break down traditional divisions between the public and the private, mass and interpersonal communication, information and entertainment, production and consumption, and audience roles would hybridize into those of “produser” (Bruns, 2005) or “prosumer” (Toffler, 1980).

Today user-generated content (UGC) is actively solicited by news institutions, and the open publishing sites have developed into giant content-sharing fora and into a blogosphere. Some of the citizen interventions found here are extending the boundaries of democracy, because they are voicing alternatives and critical points of view that are more radical than those of consensual mainstream politics and that can therefore be seen as “oppositional” – not just interpretatively (as at Stage 1 above, when reception researchers were analyzing “oppositional” and hegemonic citizenship), but interventionally: the alternative voices often originate in “a preoccupation with the global issues around which contemporary identity is shaped: globalization itself; the environment; protection of endangered species; human rights and free speech” (Ross & Nightingale, 2003, p. 153).

While political communication research has overwhelmingly focused on the role of the media in elections, Torpe's (2006) study of online citizens explores whether the Internet adds something to the deliberative processes of local municipalities during a period of normal political activity between elections. Setting out to explore empirically how the Internet can be seen to enable deliberative practices or not, Torpe defines “public deliberation” as “non-coercive forms of arguments circulating between transmitters and receivers in open spaces based on mutual expectations of being listened to and receiving some sort of response,” where “consensus is a possibility, not a necessity or a normative ideal” (Torpe, 2006, p. 36). He also investigates whether the Internet can work in parallel with the traditional media in these respects and whether it adds new democratic affordances for citizens.

Torpe's empirical study is a holistic one, in which he investigates Internet usage and experiences in three local communities in Denmark. He concludes cautiously that the Internet does have some potential for increasing citizens' interest in participating in deliberations about local affairs, but that potential should not be exaggerated. Little “indicates that the net has replaced other sources of information or that new groups of people are included in the information activities (p. 39).

With respect to agenda-setting and deliberative functions, however, the net has had a moderately vitalizing effect on municipal democracy. While online participants tend to resemble those who are also active offline,

Taking these issues to a new sphere – that of young people using the Internet for purposes of civic participation – Banaji, Buckingham, van Zoonen, and Hirzalla (2009) arrive at quite similar conclusions, drawing on reception analysis and other methods: while the Internet can be a valuable tool for young people who are already engaged in political or civic activity, the use of networked technologies is “not inherently democratic, nor does it automatically have democratic consequences” (p. 4). Another finding is that, in order to be successful in engaging young people, online provision should be linked to offline activities and to “related concerns and issues that young people are experiencing in their everyday lives” (ibid.). Moreover, the more these issues spring from young people's local community or from aspects of identity politics, the more they are likely to engage young people in communicative and deliberative activities.

More in the fashion of classic reception studies, Wahl-Jørgensen, Williams, and Wardle (2010) analyze audience perceptions of user-generated content (UGC) in the news media. They are driven by a desire to explore whether the user-generated content enabled by digital communication technologies is transforming journalism in democratizing and egalitarian ways. On the whole, their findings confirm what has been found by other researchers (see Örnebring, 2008): UGC is no panacea for contemporary journalism, which tends to domesticate the participatory formats in accordance with commercial imperatives and professional norms. As a window on the audience's sense-making practices of UGC, Wahl-Jørgensen and her team interviewed 12 focus groups with a total of 100 people recruited to represent the key demographics of class, age, gender, and levels of activism. The group discussions were organized around different types of UGC: eye-witness accounts, online interaction, text messages and emails, and radio phone-ins.

Audiences were found to distinguish clearly between content UGC and comment UGC: generally informants are very positive toward content UGC, which includes audience footage, audience experiences, and audience stories and is perceived to be immediate, fresh coverage collected before the arrival of professional news teams. These forms of UGC add drama and emotion, are more authentic, and are seen to be a real democratization of news production (Wahl-Jørgensen et al., 2010, pp. 181–182). The researchers relate this preference for perspectives not produced by journalists (the professional experts of news reporting) to the findings of Livingstone and Lunt (1994), whose living-room audiences of television debate programs also found the contributions of lay participants to be more valuable than those of political and academic experts. Such populist “valorisation of the voices of ‘ordinary people’” appears to indicate that, “in contemporary public debate, the authority of the ‘deep personal’ experience trumps that of specialized professional or political knowledge of the facts” (Wahl-Jørgensen et al., 2010, p. 184).

In contrast, audience “comment,” which includes opinions offered by individuals in radio phone-ins or have-your-say debates on the Internet, is viewed less favorably, because the motivations of those contributing are viewed with suspicion: lay commentators are seen as “uninformed and inarticulate; publicity seekers looking for their five minutes of fame; holding extreme and often unpalatable views; and/or bored, lonely people with too much time on their hands” (ibid., p. 185). From a democratic perspective, it thus seems that the more UGC is offered by audience members as active citizens seeking to make a contribution to democratic deliberation, the less it is valued by news consuming audiences: “The self-interest associated with public participation undermines the value of the contribution, insofar as it does not appear to be motivated by concerns about the common good, but instead is squarely focused on displaying individual opinions (ibid., p. 186).

Equally dishearteningly, Wahl-Jørgensen and colleagues find that what keeps those who do care about the common good away from contributing to the citizen fora of the mediatized public sphere is the inconsequentiality of such contributions. As one informant phrases it:

RICHARD:

Whatever I write in about the budget isn't going to change what our money gets spent on, is it? [. . .] If I knew that my information was going to go to the House of Commons [. . .], then I can see the point of commenting. But when you just comment, and just put your opinion into a computer like that there's no point. (Ibid., p. 187)

This sense of powerlessness experienced by citizens also looms large in the findings of Couldry and colleagues' (2007) large-scale mapping of public engagement with the media.

It would seem that, with such democratic despondency, we have reached an impasse for deliberative democracy on a mass scale:

On the one hand, it is clear that a citizen's desire to speak emerges from the belief that somewhere someone is listening and that, if the arguments offered are relevant and weighty, that someone will act appropriately. On the other hand, it is equally clear that there is no way this kind of universal communicative consequentiality can be operationalized in decision-making political units such as nations, regions, or even municipalities. It would therefore seem that, for most citizens in democratic societies, the rewards of communicative engagement with the media in public debates, in traditional and more participatory media, will have to come from involvement in local communities and from immersion in the political issues that individuals find to be personally worthwhile. Some of these community activities and their attention to issues, though local and small-scale, will have participatory ramifications beyond the national boundaries, emerging eventually in the contexts of supranational and global public spheres.

Cammaerts (2008) offers an extensive review of the participatory potentials of Web 2.0 (which he terms the “blogosphere”), in all the contradictory diversity of its coexisting emancipatory and oppressive potentials and its parallels with mainstream and oppositional discourses. His conclusions suggest the need to adopt both a sobering corrective to the utopian visions of the democratic potential of the social Internet and a theoretical invitation, based on the work of Chantal Mouffe (1999; see Carpentier & Cammaerts, 2006), to move beyond the Habermassian ideal of “the” public sphere:

Stage 5: Ubiquitous Citizenship

For more than a decade, political and cultural theorists, including scholars with a key interest in media studies, have been attempting to re-theorize the notion of the public sphere in the direction of what they call cultural citizenship and civic agency (Turner, 2001; Dahlgren, 2006; Couldry, 2006). Their theoretical work draws on the extensive debates about Habermas' theory of the public sphere that have been going on since the translation of his 1962 German book into English in 1989 (Calhoun, 1992). While subscribing to the idea of a myriad of partisan “micro” public spheres feeding into the consensual Habermassian “macro” public sphere (Fraser, 1992; Garnham, 1992), or to Keane's vision of “complex mosaics of differently sized, overlapping and connected public spheres” (Keane, 1999), they also seek to redefine legitimate politics as something that cannot and should not be confined spatially to a sacred political sphere characterized by formal political institutions, but that is fundamentally anchored in people's everyday realities (Livingstone, 2005). Moreover, echoing the scholars of Stage 3 (popular citizenship), cultural citizenship also confronts the conceptions of citizenship that reify rationality and impartiality, arguing that political engagement is often a product of passionate feeling (Wahl-Jørgensen, 2006).

Dahlgren and Olsson's (2009) study of young citizens' enactment of mediated civic agency analyzes the “civic culture” concept of democratic engagement, previously developed by Dahlgren (2009). Through qualitative interviews in Sweden, the authors offer “concrete examples of how, specifically, the internet has been shaped into a resource for young, politically active people's concrete everyday practices of pursuing their political interests” (Dahlgren & Olsson, 2009, p. 209). Civic agency thus has to do with “the subjective side of citizenship,” with how “one can see oneself as a citizen,” and with “a sense of belonging to – and perceived possibilities for participating in – societal development” (ibid., p. 200). The sample of informants is deliberately biased in favor of young people (16–19-year-olds) who are affiliated to political parties of youth organizations and various alternative activist movements.

Dahlgren and Olsson's interviews demonstrate that the Internet is an important resource for these informants' knowledge repertoires – for obtaining a regular overview of “the news,” for seeking information from first-hand sources about what goes on under the surface of the political landscape, and for acquiring alternative or non mainstream information. By participating in online debates in political fora, the informants are socialized to observe democratic values and procedures such as equality, solidarity, openness, reciprocity, tolerance, and so on and they learn adherence to the common good by engaging with other debaters, with whom they disagree, not as if the latter were “enemies,” but by approaching them as rational and legitimate “adversaries.”

The interviews also show that the young citizens are taking full advantage of the digital opportunities for activating collective intelligence and creativity, for instance by contributing to an “adbusters” website, where activists may collaborate about parodying unethical or sexist commercials (for digital content creation in the “mash-up culture,” see Löwgren, 2010). As this study shows, some kinds of reception research that are carried out from the civic culture perspective, while declaring their interest to be in the performance of “citizenship in everyday life,” continue to adhere to a Habermassian normative notion of citizenship, according to which a certain level of engagement and activity in “real” politics is required in order for citizenship to count as legitimate. By implication, an individual who is not active in political organizations or in public debates tends to be left out of the investigation. Such a notion of civic culture is not really anchored in a multifarious, “not-so-political” everyday life.

However, another strand of contemporary thinking about media and citizenship incorporates the everyday perspective of citizenship into its theoretical agenda in a manner that breaks more radically with the Habermassian heritage, wishing to map and assess mediated citizenship in practices that are not just embryonic stages of “real” politics but are firmly lodged in the realm of the everyday and often are not perceived as political at all by individuals (that is, at a subjective level). Suggesting that citizenship today is “ubiquitous,” Jeffrey Jones argues that “we engage politics everywhere, all the time, and the media are central to that engagement” (2006, p. 9). Here citizenship is taken all the way to incorporate a celebration of the dormant political potential of people's informal conversations in daily life:

Kevin Barnhurst (2003) explicitly denounces the Habermassian ideal of citizenship as he tries to develop a new ideal of citizenship as a yardstick for evaluating ordinary people's political activity. According to Barnhurst, the Habermassian ideal of citizenship “sets up an unreachable ideal that devalues how people enact citizenship in daily life” (Barnhurst, 2003, p. 134), and “requires levels of commitment to political activity that amount to more than full-time work” (p. 137). On the basis of a qualitative life-story approach to citizenship, Barnhurst argues that political communication research should perceive politics as something that, for most people, “becomes intentional only in sporadic flashes” (p. 133).

With this growing awareness of the need to redirect the focus of political communication research toward the everyday micro-dynamics of democracy, reception research tends to adopt a theoretical agnosticism about what is democratically valuable and what is not. It is argued that the inconspicuous practices of daily life can be seen as the site of identities and passions from which people can sometimes – if the occasion arises, so to speak – be launched into the public sphere (Wahl-Jørgensen, 2006).

The empirical work of Irene Costera Meijer on the everyday news consumption and reception of young people in the Netherlands can be seen as congenial to this rejuvenated version of public sphere theory (Meijer, 2007). First, Meijer finds that, for many young informants, the distinction between information and entertainment is not operative. Thus fiction genres are said to be “informative” because they sustain emotional intelligence and thus provide an understanding of how something feels.

Second, Meijer finds that the informative function of media is becoming secondary to their communicative function in social networks, in other words the way news enables young people to join in the small talk of peer group networks. News reception research, therefore, should look not only for the “learning outcomes” of news consumption (as do Curran, Lund, Iyengar, & Salovaara-Moring, 2009 and Pew Research Center, 2008), but for the way news exposure contributes to “mediated public connection” (Couldry et al., 2007).

Third, Meijer refutes the accusations of superficiality directed at the young generation, which are sometimes heard from cultural critics. Even when young people are merely grazing the news media, they are not necessarily being superficial; they try to avoid missing anything important. And, while the “snacking” approach is the one they often adopt, they also go for the full meal once in a while – and therefore (while they are critical of traditional news formats) they nevertheless want “the news” to remain the way it is! News is sacrosanct.

In another empirical study based on the notion of cultural citizenship, Cornel Sandvoss argues that discourses around the consumption of sports do not mark the further decline of a free and rational public; rather such discourses can sometimes constitute “an alternative public sphere in which significant cultural, social, and political issues, which are neglected or insufficiently addressed in the official channels of parliamentary democracies, are negotiated and reflected upon” (Sandvoss, 2009, p. 60). The study consists of reception interviews with soccer fans and of a netnographic examination of the Internet conversations of fans of the German soccer club Bayer Leverkusen about non-white players in the team and about other fans' racist abuse toward them. The analysis of these responses documents that sport holds immense political potential: the fan discourses incorporate exchanges about nationalism, ethnicity, religion, gender, and other issues of political significance.

In a wider sense, these findings can be seen as evidence that politics and citizenship are indeed being acted out everywhere, as part of a ubiquitous civic agency. Following Hartley (1999), Sandvoss argues that today the mass media are the public sphere, instead of merely being a sadly deficient vehicle of such a sphere, and that simply by virtue of being a member of the media audience the individual is a politically inscribed citizen.

Audiences as Citizens: A Historical Typology

The five stages of reception research on media-influenced citizenship presented and discussed above can be put together, in tabular form, into a historical typology, which encapsulates in strongly reductionist fashion the key characteristics of the successive lenses through which reception researchers have observed, analyzed, and explained how the media influence the democratic prerequisites and practices of citizens and how citizens draw on the media as resources for democratic understanding and action (see Table 23.1).

For each stage, the typology lists the analytical and political aims of those working under the paradigm in question, the main theorists, the primary methodological approach, a handful of key researchers applying the perspective, and the approximate year in which the paradigm emerged. It should be stressed, of course, that the boundaries between the stages should be seen as porous and that previous stages (except Stage 1) continue without rupture, coexisting with emerging ones.

Ubiquitous Citizenship: Challenges for Reception Research

If politics and citizenship are everywhere, they should be explored everywhere. And, to the extent that they are intertwined with the media – which is a fundamental condition of life in mediatized societies (Strömbäck, 2008; Hjarvard, 2008; Livingstone, 2009) – reception research should explore them across the total ensemble of media.

Moreover, we should direct our empirical interest toward the ways in which the media – traditional and digital – function as everyday routine resources for what we might call “dormant citizenship” – how the media may, “subliminally” as it were, in an everyday, non-conspicuous process, help build the forms of civic knowledge, the communicative literacies, and the aesthetic repertoires that are the prerequisites for making the transition from latency to agency and from dormant to vigilant citizenship if and when the occasion arises in the life history of an individual.

In order for this to happen, it is necessary to adopt a radical user's perspective, which means that we have to explore from the individual's point of view how his or her particular constellation of media – routinely, subconsciously, and consciously selected from the ensemble of media – is subjectively perceived and makes sense in that individual's life. Metaphorically speaking, we must ask people to tell us what – when they shop in the media-as-supermarket – they take from the shelves and put into their shopping carts, and why. This may involve reception researchers in empirical designs that extend the boundaries of reception research in the direction of audience ethnography, along the lines of Marie Gillespie's study of the everyday TV talk of diasporic youth cultures in London. Here talk about news among Punjabi teenagers led to “explicit consideration of the themes of citizenship, class and ‘race,’ and religious, cultural and national difference and identity” (Gillespie, 1995, p. 26). Her study alerts us to the fact that, in many respects, the “political” significance of civic agency derives from practices belonging in the arena of everyday culture and of the creative expression of hybrid identities (see also the anthropological studies of news audiences in Bird, 2010, Part 2).

Table 23.1 Five historical stages of audiences as citizens, as seen by reception research

Also, we should direct our attention to the online media sphere for a glimpse of people's spontaneous discussions of urgent social and cultural issues. Studying the two reality TV programs Big Brother and Wife Swap as a trigger for everyday political talk in the discussion forums connected to the programs, Graham and Hajru find that, in such discussions,

Pursuing related micro-agency objectives, the reception study about cross-media news consumption that is currently carried out by the author of this chapter (see Schrøder & Steeg Larsen, 2010; Schrøder & Kobbernagel, 2010) adopts a qualitative approach intended to discover, at ground level, the cross-media news packages (or constellations) appropriated by citizen-consumers from the news market supply. In principle, everyday citizenship emerges from engagement with all kinds of media, and any limitation of the scope of this project to news media is done solely for pragmatic reasons, to prevent the risk of wanting to study everything and ending up studying nothing. At the end of the project, we want to be able to discern the similarities and differences between the contents of the informants' news-shopping carts, to discover reliable and valid patterns or types of news media use with democratic implications.

It is a premise of our analysis that people's choice of news media is determined by what news media they perceive to be worthwhile – because the particular constellation they put together on a daily and weekly basis has established itself as one that cumulatively satisfies their conscious and unconscious needs for information about what goes on in their world. People only use the news media that they experience as delivering some kind of pay-off. There must be some metaphorical “interest” resulting from the “investment” they make in their portfolio of news media.

This has to do, above all else, with people's experience of the relevance of the news media's news and views, comments and columns, cartoons and comics, and the rest. The crucial factor in the experience of content relevance is the news media's capacity to enable “public connection.” A heuristic concept invented by Couldry and colleagues, public connection is defined as a shared

In accordance with what was said above about the need to modernize and broaden the Habermassian notion of civic agency, we use public connection in a broader sense, to denote people's need to equip themselves both for the role of citizen-member of the democratic order, through mediatized information about public affairs, and for the role of belonging as a community member in the broadest possible everyday sense.³

Weaving public connections entails relying on media resources in order to participate in social and cultural networks of all kinds in everyday life; being able to navigate adequately as a spouse, parent, neighbor, colleague, consumer, and simply human being in late modern life; being able to communicate sensibly with significant others in one's close networks, as well as with more distant others in relevant commercial and institutional contexts. Public connection, in our use of the term, thus includes both what we might call “everyday public connection” and “political public connection.” To illuminate the transitions among these two is the main challenge for reception researchers who wish to understand media citizenship.

NOTES

1 The concept of monitorial citizenship used here was coined independently of Schudson's (1998) characterization of citizens who engage in information-gathering and processing in the era of abundance of mediated information in the last decades of the twentieth century (Schudson, 1998). I use “monitorial citizenship” more commonsensically, to denote a citizen who relies routinely on the news media in order to form a working impression of his social environment.

2 The two strands of innovative thinking about civic agency outlined here sometimes coexist in the work of one scholar, although their political visions are quite different. For example, I draw on different writings by Dahlgren to illuminate the two strands.

3 A related effort to understand “how individuals and groups form democratic selves, or identities, and under what conditions of life” can be found in the work of Lewis A. Friedland (Friedland, 2001, p. 359). Using quantitative methods, this work represents an ambitious attempt to theorize and investigate into how societies cohere, focusing on the ecology of media communication at the local community level, while the citizens' sense making of the media is not a central concern.

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