Professional Documents
Culture Documents
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS
VOLUME 16
NUMBER 2
(JUNE 2006)
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, and
rewarded 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 fundamentally, 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 sexual
citizenship 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
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K. WAHL-JORGENSEN
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 Ju
rgen Habermas (1989) account of the rise of
the public sphere in eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Europe. Habermas 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)
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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 selfinterest. 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 following
the 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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MEDIATED CITIZENSHIP(S)
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References
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Habermas, Ju
rgen. 1974. The public sphere: An encyclopaedia article. New German
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*/*/*/. 1989. The structural transformation of the public sphere . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
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Lewis, Justin, S. Inthorn, and K. Wahl-Jorgensen. 2005. Citizens or consumers? What the
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