Lewis A. Friedland

The Networked Public Sphere

Abstract Habermas’s late theory of the public sphere is fundamentally about democracy and growing complexity. The network form is at the core of growing complexity, and the centrality of networks in the economy, political system, civil society, and the lifeworld calls for revisions in central theoretical assumptions about the structure of the public sphere. We argue that in order to maintain Habermas’s larger democratic project, we will have to rethink theoretical assumptions linked to its neo-Parsonsian systems theoretical foundations and to systematically integrate new network forms of social life into theory.

The Politics of Consumption/The Consumption of Politics

As consumer culture pervades the social life of citizens in America and Europe, it becomes increasingly important to clarify the relationship between consumption and citizenship. With this in mind, faculty and students at the University of Wisconsin organized a conference titled “The Politics of Consumption/The Consumption of Politics.” Held in October 2006, the meeting provided a forum for leading scholars to discuss the interplay of markets, media, politics, and the citizen-consumer. Revised and expanded versions of the papers they presented are collected in this volume with the goal of advancing this emerging area of inquiry. It is our hope that the essays and research papers we have collected here help define the next wave of theory building and research inquiry on the intersections of consumer culture, civic culture, and mass culture.

Capital, Consumption, Communication, and Citizenship: The Social Positioning of Taste and Civic Culture in the United States

In this article, the authors analyze the field of cultural consumption in the United States. Using the 2000 DDB Lifestyle Study, they examine a cross-section of Americans in terms of their occupational categories, media usage, consumption practices, social behaviors, and indicators of civic and political engagement. In doing so, the authors find many parallels to the determinants of taste, cultural discrimination, and choice within the field structure observed by Bourdieu in 1960s French society. However, there are also some notable differences in terms of the composition of cultural capital consistent with the concept of omnivorousness. The distribution of positions is largely defined by patterns of taste that discriminate between refinement, moderation, nurturance, and a communal orientation, on one side, and coarseness, excess, aggressiveness, and an individual orientation, on the other. Historical and national differences partly account for this variation, but a major role may be played by the increasing formation of identities around media and consumption, leading to a more gendered and ideological positioning of taste cultures in the U.S context.

Communication, Consumers, and Citizens Revisiting the Politics of Consumption

The year 2011 was defined by the intersection of politics and economics: the Wisconsin protests, the Occupy Movement, anti-austerity demonstrations, the Buffett Rule, and so on. These events drew attention to the role of politics in the erosion of labor power, the rise of inequality, and the excesses of overconsumption. Moving beyond periodic and dutiful action directed at an increasingly unresponsive government, citizens tested the boundaries of what we consider civic engagement by embracing personalized forms of “lifestyle politics” enacted in everyday life and often directed at the market. These issues are the focus of this volume, which we divide into four sections. The first section attempts both to situate consumption in politics as a contemporary phenomenon and to view it through a wider historical lens. The second section advances the notion of sustainable citizenship at the individual/group level and the societal/institutional level, and understands consumption as socially situated and structured. Extending this thinking, the third section explores various forms of conscious consumption and relates them to emerging modes of activism and engagement. The fourth section questions assumptions about the effectiveness of the citizen-consumer and the underlying value of political consumerism and conscious consumption. We conclude by distilling six core themes from this collection for future work.

The Lifeworld of Youth in the Information Society

Media is now central to how youth form their identities. Media also shapes the cultural background of much of young people’s action and decision making and the institutional framework of social interaction. This article explores this mediated “lifeworld” of young people by examining rates of current media use and the infiltration of media into conventional forms of socialization such as schools, family, and peers. The authors argue that increasing media use coincides with a larger structural shift to an information-based society wherein social relationships are constituted and reinforced through a cycle of “networked individualism” and growing “risk” among youth. The authors illustrate the cycle of media use, individualization, and risk by briefly examining (a) rising economic insecurity among all Americans and American youth in particular, and (b) the contradictions minority youth face in navigating structural barriers to achievement. The authors conclude by discussing the implications of their work and suggesting policy directions for youth in a media-saturated society.

Examining the Effects of Public Journalism on Civil Society from 1994 TO 2002: Organizational Factors, Project Features, Story Frames, and Citizen Engagement

After more than a decade of public journalism efforts, empirical knowledge of whether these efforts have met the movements goals remains largely based on in-depth case studies. To address this shortcoming, this study analyzes 651 cases of public journalism conducted between 1994 to 2002. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis is used to consider the predictive power of organizational factors, project features, story frames, and efforts to engage citizens and assess public opinion on three civil society outcomes: improvements in citizenship, political processes, and volunteerism. Specific effects on civil society are discussed, study limitations are addressed, and insights for future research and practice are offered.

Cultivating Success: Youth Achievement, Capital and Civic Engagement in the Contemporary United States

Amidst current research on the positive impact of rising rates of youth civic participation, but also indications of a shift in the underlying forms of civic life and increasing socioeconomic disparities in levels of participation, the authors investigate the meaning of civic engagement from the perspective of high-school-aged youth. The authors inductively develop a typology of engagement based on in-depth interviews with a purposive stratified sample of eighty-nine high school students in a Midwestern city. The authors find that youth link civic engagement with ambition and achievement as a means to build capital in a Bourdieuian field of youth achievement. While civic engagement is informed by structural position, youth are actively involved in navigating their positions and choices. Civic engagement emerges primarily through volunteerism as youth struggle to assemble and deploy capital in the achievement field and thus compound class-based disparities in civic involvement.

Public television as public sphere: The case of the Wisconsin collaborative project

Public television in the U.S. is examined as a public sphere institution through the case of the Wisconsin Collaborative Project (WCP), a programming cooperative contributing to the national PBS schedule. The prevailing model of the organizational field of public television is revised to analyze the expansion of horizontal exchange, diversity, and decentralization represented by the WCP, and thus the capacity of public television to fulfill its public sphere mission.

The Local Public Sphere as a Networked Space

In the United States, the public sphere has traditionally been grounded in the local community, and there has always been a close association between public space and community space. In both theory and practice, local communities and the public networks within them have served as ‘schools for democracy,’ however partially at times.

Consuming Ourselves to Dearth: Escalating Inequality and Public Opinion

This article proposes an agenda for research on the relation of structural inequality to the study of politics and consumption in the field of communication. The authors review evidence for increasing inequality in the United States and argue that (1) consumption choices and desires are strongly constrained by structural location; (2) political beliefs and attitudes are shaped by location in the income or class structure; and (3) consumption as a form of political self-expression or civic identity, for example, boycotting or “buycotting,” is also constrained by economic structural location. Given these propositions, it becomes critical to analytically situate notions of personalization of politics within the context of increasing economic inequality.