Presentation given to annual LSE/ University of Southern California research. seminar, Annenberg School of communication, Los Angeles, 5 December 2003

Transcription

1 Researching Public Connection Nick Couldry London School of Economics and Political Science Presentation given to annual LSE/ University of Southern California research seminar, Annenberg School of communication, Los Angeles, 5 December 2003 Background PUT ON OH1 I want to talk about research that is currently taking up most of my time: large-scale project funded by ESRC/ AHRB called Media Consumption and the Future of Public Connection. 30 month project, only in 2 nd month: so at most can share with you our questions and plans for methodology. But hope of interest intending to address Qs about relationship between media and conditions for democratic politics that, I believe, have wider resonance beyond Britain. Widespread concerns at policy level with future of democratic politics. Declining voter turn-out, declining allegiance to formal political parties.... and although different more positive readings of this (eg Tarrow) in terms of shift of focus of politics away from institutions towards networks, single-issue campaigns etc, = a significant concern. Can encapsulate the concern perhaps in single Question: what will be the basis of political legitimacy if and when voter turnout at national elections falls regularly below 50%, ie when politicians working assumption that when they speak, a majority of the population is potentially paying attention is no longer a plausible assumption...?

2 I m not a political scientist, but have been intrigued for nearly 3 years about what is the role of media in all this for parallel concerns about decline in an older media world where prime time television could be assumed to be prime-time, to provide a primary focus for national attention. Also a long-term shift, linked to multiplication of outlets within media and multiplication of media themselves. Have wanted to see what contribution research focussed within media sociology could make to understanding the possible connections between these two large-scale processes in which the social centrality of both formal politics and electronic media possibly being eroded. Did a small pilot study with Ana Langer at LSE in , drawing on two sources: Qs to the UK s Mass-Observation Archive Panel and a small set of interviews. Aim of the pilot was generally methodological: testing out questions, testing out the relative value of the panel and face-to-face interview methods. Although some interesting material emerged eg about - Alienation both from media consumption and from contemporary British politics of significant numbers of the quite elderly, mainly female Mass Obs sample - By contrast, the them, across number of interviewees of media use as a form of connection, but taking various different forms (a more traditional form based on national press, TV and radio; and a newer form based on continuous online connection) - The importance of time (ie constraints on available time) in limiting possibilities of mediated connection... Public Connection Project

3 PUT ON OH2 Want to spend most of my time however hope won t be frustrating, but rather illuminating talking about a project which has only just started. Talk about our strategy, methods... We are concerned to investigate the empirical validity of two connected and widely made assumptions: First that, in a democracy such as Britain, most people share an orientation to a public world where matters of common concern are, or at least should be, addressed (we call this orientation public connection ); and Second that this public connection is focussed principally on mediated versions of that public world (ie that public connection is principally sustained by a convergence in what media people consume, that is sustained by what we might call shared media consumption ). The first assumption is, we would argue, implicit in most political science and political theory (especially republican and civil society models of democracy, but also liberal models and even, it can be argued, elite models of democracy) - [or at least models that seek to explain democratic political authority - realise that there are some, such as Sheldon Wolin, who controversially question whether better to analyse current forms of politics in terms of emerging authoritarianism, not democracy but won t get into that issue]. For it is only on the basis of this first assumption that the (separate) assumption of the legitimacy of democratic political authority can be built: consent to political authority requires that people s attention to the public world can be assumed, or at least that a general orientation to that world can be assumed which from time to time (including the times when consent is explicitly requested) results in

4 actual attention. This orientation (which itself can be analysed into many aspects, including cognitive and emotive) is what we mean by public connection. Note that in calling this orientation public connection, we are taking a view on what itself is a highly contested term: publicness. Drawing on Weintraub (1997) [ref in endnote] we acknowledge the doubleness of the term public/ private distinction: which, on the one hand, identifies a zone of collective concerns that is properly political and, on the other, identifies a generally visible and accessible world that is distinct from the space of private life that is protected from access. The questions of collectivity and accessibility/ visibility are connected, but distinct. Sometimes the crossover between them is contentious as in the famous feminist insistence that the personal is political, which can be interpreted to mean: some things that some people regard as private (not accessible) are in fact collective (of collective concern), and therefore must be made visible, so that they become accessible to collective intervention. We are not minimising such debates when we say (cf Elshtain, 1997 in endnote) that underlying them is the assumption that we can still give meaning to the distinction between what is of collective concern and what is not. Although the word publicness is double in meaning, it is this collective dimension that is more important to our research; this is because our research concerns politics (and people s orientations to the possibility of politics) where visiblility/ accessibility is essential, but logically secondary (ie while everything political must in principle be made visible/ accessible, not everything visible/accessible must be political). When therefore we talk about investigating public connection, we mean connection to a world of collective concern (cf Arendt, Dewey, etc).

5 The second initial assumption is detachable from the first you could believe that public connection is sustained by processes other than media consumption, or even (cf Putnam s Bowling Alone thesis) that aspects of media consumption undermine public connection. This second assumption, nonetheless, is, in some form or other, still implicit in much political science and also much media sociology (in so far as the latter is concerned with the relation between media and a public world). These assumptions are deliberately formulated in a quite general, abstract fashion, because we are concerned with the empirical validity of a frame of public orientation that could be shared by people even if they disagreed, or differed, over any of the following more specific issues: Their political values Their cultural allegiances and attachments The range of things that are appropriate topics for political discussion and action The range of people who are legitimate political actors The institutional sites appropriate for political discussion and action. Indeed we cannot assume common answers to those detailed questions after decades of feminist debate, shifts in the focus of political engagement (cf postmaterialist values work, Inglehart and others), shifting debates about what politics should be concerned with. Such disagreements, however, can be seen as dependent upon a shared orientation to a public world (on whose contents, precisely, they are focussed). Hence our attempt to focus our research on that underlying public connection.

6 But does the assumption of public connection have any empirical basis, and if so what basis, in people s lives and actions? There are a range of reasons (or at least potential reasons) for putting this assumption to empirical test in contemporary Britain: The fragmentation of people s attention to any public world (because of pressures of time from changing work patterns etc) The diminishing of people s practical connection to institutions of political participation The fragmentation of media consumption, across and within media, into multiple sphericules that do not interconnect. Without of course assuming that these or other factors are determining, we believe the time is ripe to begin research into how, and in what ways, public connection is traceable in people s actions and reflections upon their actions. Methods PUT ON OH3 Potentially this is a huge and long-term undertaking. For now, we are engaged in a more modest first stage: detailed qualitative enquiry with 30 subjects designed (through a partly structured and partly open-ended diary form) to uncover the range of understandings they have of their public connection (if any), and its links (if any) to their media consumption. While we will start with the individual voice, we do not believe the individual can be studied in isolation, hence our interest in following the trajectory of individuals discussions of such issues with others, and conducting subsequent interviews and focus-groups that will track some of those discussions. Towards the end of our project we will do a national survey to generalise out some of the themes that emerge from the detailed qualitative work.

7 Want to say more about the diary method: - Are using diaries because convinced that interviews alone (ie methods involving the presence of the researcher) wouldn t necessarily be adequate in uncovering people s ongoing reflections on such difficult issues (public connection, the contribution of one s media consumption to one s sense, if any, of public connection). Hence value of a combination of researcher-absent methods (as Liz Bird in recent book the Audience in Everyday Life 2003 calls them) ie diaries + researcher-present methods (interviews, focus groups) that can reflect back on the diary-writing. - Some precedent for this combination eg in literature around observing medical conditions but NB the research literature on diaries has generally been concerned either with using diaries as an alternative to observation (of time-use, or the practices of sick patients) or as open-ended unstructured form of reflection or selfexpression more like diary in general auto-biographical sense... So our approach genuinely seeking reflections (not just self-observation) but in a partly structured format seems unusual... - Aware that written diary format will suit some people better than others: eg gender differences (cf Bird), possibly ethnic differences. So building in variability and flexibility into the method: basic written format, supplemented by choice of , phone message/ call, recorded tape... But of course too early to say if this will work, or whether will need to adjust further...

8 Potential conclusions? But to end (in presenting a project that has only just started) may help to complete the picture of the strategy underlying the project to mention some conclusions that even now we might anticipate and which would be interesting outcomes of the research: We are ready to find, for example, that A number of people lack any sense of public connection (with some of them wanting things otherwise, and others wanting things to remain that way) While everyone we ask reports a sense of public connection, it is focussed on a range of public worlds which differ and may even be exclusive of each other (in terms of institutional site, scale etc) There are a number of people for whom media consumption is less important than our second starting assumption claims (so for them public connection is sustained through local groups, which meet face-to-face around agendas not reflected in media narratives) Such possibilities can, we would argue, only become visible if we bracket off specific questions about the content of politics, in order to focus on some underlying assumptions and orientations. Such outcomes might challenge our sense of how democratic politics is legitimated and/or media s role in sustaining the possibility of democratic politics. Or we may find that our two starting assumptions are empirically confirmed, but have a much better sense of how they are sustained in people s everyday lives.