RESEARCH/ANALYSIS FINAL ASSIGNMENT

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LaurieOuellette_Citizenship_.pdf

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But debates about censorship on the Internet remain

ongoing. The OpenNet Initiative found that, in 2013,

forty- three of the seventy- five countries it surveyed en-

gaged in some form of Internet filtering, for political,

social, religious, or cultural reasons (OpenNet Initiative

2014). The nation with the world’s largest Internet- using

population, the People’s Republic of China, is known for

extensive blocking of Internet sites and state monitor-

ing of online content. Even among countries that do not

engage in such practices, government agencies often re-

strict content or issue takedown notices where material

is illegal or contravenes social norms: child sexual abuse

material, “extreme” pornography, and material that ad-

vocates violence against others or terrorism is blocked in

multiple jurisdictions (Edwards 2009).

The sheer volume of content on the Internet, and the

impossibility of state agencies being able to monitor it,

has meant that Internet- based companies themselves

increasingly undertake such filtering tasks on their web-

sites. Online platform providers have terms of service

associated with user access that provide them with con-

siderable discretion in their ability to take down content

they deem to be objectionable. The role played by social

media platform/service provides such as Google/You-

Tube, Facebook, Instagram, and others in routinely tak-

ing down content on the basis of criteria that may range

from obscenity to vilification to breach of copyright has

opened up issues about the forms of accountability and

transparency that accompany such de facto censorship.

The issues raised range from the lack of external scrutiny

that can be applied to such decisions to the application

of different rules in different jurisdictions (e.g., geo-

blocking content that may offend religious or political

sensitivities in some countries), the relationship this

has to wider questions of algorithmic governance, or

the growing importance of technological algorithms as a

means of regulation in the digital realm (Gillespie 2014).

11 Citizenship Laurie Ouellette

The relationship between media and citizenship is

contradictory and evolving. Since the rise of mass

media, social scientists and critics have worried about

its deleterious impact on democracy. Such concerns

typically hinge on the assumption that commercial

media trade on trivial pleasures, emotions, and

consumer values that inhibit public participation in

political affairs. However, mass media have also been

understood as “citizen machines” (McCarthy 2010)

that can be harnessed to guide and shape the citizenry

(or segments of it) for democracy and public life— an

agenda that gave rise to twentieth- century national

public broadcasting systems (Ouellette 2002). The

proliferation, fragmentation, and globalization of

media culture in recent decades, and the development

of new conceptual frameworks (such as cultural studies)

to analyze it, have required a critical reevaluation of

citizenship. While the marginalized and degraded

state of “serious” news and public information

remains a pressing concern for many, a growing body

of critical scholarship recognizes the role of popular

entertainment in constituting citizenship as a social

identity and everyday practice that is not limited to the

formal political sphere.

Citizenship has traditionally referred to the status of

belonging to a political body and having rights and du-

ties as a member or subject. The term stems from the

Latin word civitas, or people of a city, the locus of or-

ganized government in ancient times (Bellamy 2008).

Keywords for Media Studies, edited by Laurie Ouellette, and Jonathan Gray, New York University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/odu/detail.action?docID=4717750. Created from odu on 2022-09-01 00:12:00.

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With the rise of nation- states, Benedict Anderson (1991)

famously argues, citizenship became bound to “imag-

ined communities” that transcended local connections.

The commercial printing press was crucial to this pro-

cess: books, newspapers, calendars, and other printed

materials standardized language and discourse, encour-

aging dispersed citizen- subjects to recognize common-

alities and making it possible to govern within a na-

tional framework. For Anderson, this emergent “print

capitalism” was pivotal in the shift from monarchy to

democracy.

Founded on liberal ideals of self- government, early

modern democracies like the United States continued

to experiment with direct, face- to- face participation in

political rule, as exemplified by the agrarian town hall.

However, exercising citizenship on a national scale ul-

timately involved layers of mediation: the selection of

representatives to “stand in” for the people, the distri-

bution of symbolic resources (such as universal educa-

tion and information) to steer public participation, and

the construction of national identity itself. The speed

and scale of industrial capitalism, waves of immigration

and urbanization, and the solidification of consumer

culture secured the mediated nature of modern citizen-

ship. While mass media (penny newspapers, magazines,

cinema, radio) were crucial to the development of mass

democracy in the West, these mass communication

technologies threatened the viability of democratic

processes in the eyes of alarmed intellectuals and early

media researchers. With each new mass medium, com-

plaints about the distracting, “dumbed down” influ-

ence of entertainment on the populace surfaced, and

by the 1920s, social critics like Walter Lippmann were

questioning whether popular participation in democ-

racy was desirable or even possible given the banalities

and distortions attributed to media and modern life.

Lippmann’s treatise Public Opinion (1922) called for a

class of educated experts to “restore reason to politics”

and relieve the masses from the burden of having an

“informed” opinion (Ouellette 2002, 111).

Mass communication research codified this recom-

mendation in the theory of the “two- step flow,” which

identified a subset of “opinion leaders” who read news-

papers and sought out public affairs broadcasts modeled

after print journalism as the natural leaders of democ-

racy. This rationalization soothed anxieties about the

masses of consumers who preferred the cheap distrac-

tions churned out by commercial radio and the new me-

dium of television. The equation of democracy with the

printed word partly evidenced nostalgia for the era of

print capitalism, but it also cast the socially legitimated

tastes, habits, and dispositions of educated white men

as prerequisites for “enlightened” participation in the

political process.

This tendency was not unique to social science. The

ideal of the rational and informed citizen has long been

a trope in critical media analysis as well. This work often

evokes the public sphere, theorized by Jürgen Habermas

(1989) as public spaces separate from the market and the

state, where people can act as citizens by deliberating is-

sues, advocating positions, and forming “publics” with

collective interests. Habermas cites the coffee houses

of the eighteenth century, where learned men would

gather to discuss and deliberate upon public affairs as

prototypes; today such public spaces are often medi-

ated and virtual. While public sphere theory points to

the urgent need for independent media not beholden

to market pressures, proponents have glossed over the

bourgeoisie origins and dictates of the public sphere in

practice. Rules of decorum and the emphasis on rational

discourse over emotionally and bodily invested forms of

participation (such as union meetings or protests) have

historically excluded women, the working classes, and

people of color from exercising agency in the “public”

Keywords for Media Studies, edited by Laurie Ouellette, and Jonathan Gray, New York University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/odu/detail.action?docID=4717750. Created from odu on 2022-09-01 00:12:00.

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spaces described by Habermas, a problem abundantly

noted by many feminist critics, Marxist theorists, and

critical race scholars (see Fraser 1990).

Despite these critiques, the model of citizenship as-

sociated with the bourgeois public sphere continues

to resonate well beyond the university. The notion of a

rational public committed to debating differences and

advancing common interests within predominantly na-

tional contexts retains currency, even as developments

in late capitalism (including the intensification of mar-

ket values, transnational cultural flows, and the prolifer-

ation of ever more specialized consumer niches) under-

mine this ideal. Since the 1990s, media scholars trained

in cultural studies and political theory have questioned

this definition of political citizenship, and tracked the

shifting shape that citizenship takes in contemporary

times. Some of this work situates the perceived failures

of democracy within the broader tensions of liberal

capitalist democracies. For example, Toby Miller (1993)

has persuasively shown how the competing demands of

the consumer economy (which encourages selfishness,

pleasure, and hedonism) and the political order (which

requires rationality, discipline, and responsibility) gen-

erate a perpetual sense of inadequacy. Because citizens

are perceived to be perpetually “at risk” of failing to ful-

fill their duties and obligations, initiatives from public

broadcasting to Univision’s Citizenship Month have

operated as corrective cultural technologies or forms of

citizenship training.

Other scholars have questioned the assumption that

popular media impede rather than enrich the political

process. Jeffrey Jones (2006), for example, rejects the

hierarchy that values the democratic function of news

over entertainment. Jones contends that the consump-

tion of popular media can also foster political engage-

ment and that satirical fake news programs like The

Daily Show may encourage a more critical understanding

of the “reality” of politics and the state than traditional

news or public affairs media (380). Jones’s “cultural ap-

proach” to mediated citizenship offers an optimistic

alternative to purists who lament the decline of news-

papers and associate the ritualized consumption of tele-

vision with antidemocratic attributes such as passivity,

hedonism, and “distraction.” Along similar lines, Lies-

bet Van Zoonen (2004) contends that the convergence

of politics and entertainment in recent decades— from

the election of Hollywood icons for political office

to the appearance of television dramas built around

government officials like The West Wing and House of

Cards— signals the “rejuvenation” of democratic citi-

zenship, not its end point. While these perspectives re-

claim an affirmative role for popular media in political

culture, they themselves risk upholding the equation of

democracy and citizenship with the official events, in-

stitutions, and figures of the political sphere.

Feminist and queer scholars have called for a more

radical revision of what counts as “political” and where

and how citizenship takes place. The robust scholarship

on the daytime talk shows of the 1990s explored how

these heavily stage- managed and ratings- driven televi-

sion programs brought ordinary people and the inti-

macies of everyday life into the public sphere. While

talk shows turned private experiences and problems

into spectacles, they also presented a mediated forum

for discussing social issues such as rape, poverty, men-

tal illness, and discrimination from the ground up.

The personal was (at least potentially) deeply political,

and the rules of decorum and social exclusions of the

white, masculine, bourgeois public sphere did not ap-

ply. For scholars like Joshua Gamson (1999), talk shows

expanded the boundaries of political life and offered a

rare opportunity for marginalized groups to “represent”

themselves within the constraints of commercial televi-

sion. As the political climate of the 1990s shifted, these

Keywords for Media Studies, edited by Laurie Ouellette, and Jonathan Gray, New York University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/odu/detail.action?docID=4717750. Created from odu on 2022-09-01 00:12:00.

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shows gave way to authoritarian forms of citizenship

training, epitomized by Judge Judy (discussed below).

Another intervention challenges the nationalist

framework in which mediated citizenship has tradi-

tionally been conceived. Globalization, migration, and

the transnational flow of media culture have encour-

aged “disjunctures” in national identity (Appadurai

1990) that require scholars to theorize citizenship in

new terms. In his research on media use among dia-

sporic communities, Stuart Cunningham (1991) argues

that the national public sphere has given way to ethno-

specific “sphericules,” or social fragments that provide

a site for public communication and hybrid forms of

belonging (often through commercially traded video-

cassettes, music videos, and other popular media forms)

beyond boundaries of the nation- state. Lynn Spigel

(2007) takes this further, arguing that nationalism “as

a cultural dominant” is also losing currency in Western

democracies like the United States, because it no longer

fits with the economic and cultural practices of late cap-

italist media and society. As narrowcasting, niche mar-

keting, and an appeal to subcultures have become “cen-

tral to global capitalism,” media content has assumed

a “culture that is deeply divided by taste, not one that

is unified through national narratives” (640). The frag-

mentation of media culture in the age of five hundred

channels also changes the contours of mediated citizen-

ship, as evidenced by the rise of niche- oriented political

brands like Fox News.

While the nation remains the basis of legal citi-

zenship, the practice of citizenship has— for better or

worse— become more consumer- oriented. Today, our

sense of belonging is often rooted in our consumption

practices and brand communities as much as in formal

political bodies. Drawing from the cultural theorist

Néstor García- Canclini (2001), Sarah Banet- Weiser con-

tends that if the nation- state retains currency as a basis

for membership and belonging, its definition has come

to hinge on interpretative communities of consumers.

Within the current context of proliferating media chan-

nels, narrowcasting, globalization, and transnational

cultural flows, she contends, the “shared identity of

consumers is increasingly one of the most meaningful

national connections among members of a community”

(2007, 10). Banet- Weiser sees the shift toward what she

calls consumer citizenship as a reconciliation of the

competing demands of the consumer economy and the

political order theorized by Miller. Increasingly, brands

(including media brands like Fox, MTV, and Bravo) en-

courage us to actualize our rights, duties, and sense of

belonging as citizens within the sphere of consumption.

The children’s cable network Nickelodeon, the focus of

Banet- Weiser’s study, claims to “empower” its viewers

to exercise their right to make consumer choices and

simultaneously escape adult rules through member-

ship in the Nickelodeon Nation. The network fuses the

promise of political and cultural power— and cleverly

connects both to participation in and identification

with the niche- oriented Nickelodeon brand.

The rising currency of corporate social responsibility,

which has largely replaced state regulation of the public

interest in media culture, stitches political citizenship

into consumer culture and brand communities in more

explicitly political ways. Most media conglomerates,

including Disney and Time Warner, now pursue robust

“socially responsible” agendas as part of their corporate

brand strategies. From encouraging volunteerism and

charitable giving to inserting prosocial messages into

television content, media corporations pursue citizen-

ship training to bolster their corporate image, which

can translate into profit. My own work on media ven-

tures like Oprah’s Big Give and the ABC TV network’s Bet-

ter Community Campaign (Ouellette 2012) shows how

corporate social responsibility stitches the demands of

Keywords for Media Studies, edited by Laurie Ouellette, and Jonathan Gray, New York University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/odu/detail.action?docID=4717750. Created from odu on 2022-09-01 00:12:00.

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the political order into the symbolic boundaries of me-

dia brands, which then become venues for traditional

forms of civic belonging as well as newer forms of con-

sumer membership. Within this context, the pursuit of

“good citizenship” does not contradict the aims of the

consumer economy, but is folded into them.

In recent years, a burgeoning strand of media schol-

arship has tracked the offloading of duties and services

historically performed by the state onto corporations

and individual consumers. The shift from the regula-

tion of the public interest, which assumes public over-

sight, to corporate social responsibility is one example;

the surge of media devoted to transforming individuals

into more enterprising, responsible, self- reliant, and

marketable versions of themselves is another. Reality

TV has received particular attention as a “technology

of neoliberal citizenship” that translates shifting ideas

about democracy and government into regimes for

everyday living. Reality TV gained visibility and cur-

rency in the early 2000s, in the wake of attempts to

privatize public institutions and downsize the postwar

welfare state. Neoliberal policies and discourses that

apply market logic to every dimension of society were

gaining hold in political discourse and the policy sec-

tor, and reality programming in the United States was

one of the clearest cultural expressions of this politi-

cal shift. Scholars have noted how reality TV competi-

tions, makeovers, docusoaps, and interventions equate

“good citizenship” with personal responsibility (see

Ouellette and Hay 2008), while also offering market-

oriented social identities, behavioral norms, advice,

and templates for self- maximization and personal en-

trepreneurship. Scholars around the world, especially

in Europe, have observed similar neoliberal tendencies

in reality TV, as market logic has intensified and pro-

grams of privatization and welfare reform have taken

hold on a global scale.

The growth of the Internet, social media, and inter-

active mobile devices (including phones) in the past

decade has intensified the long- standing debate over

media and citizenship— with no clear resolution. Some

scholars are pessimistic about new media’s capacity to

undo problems of commercialism and political passiv-

ity. We may be able to “vote” for our favorite TV idols,

share political information and opinions (as well as

GIFs, memes and the contents of our lunch) at the

touch of a button, or even participate in new forms of

“clicktivism” and hashtag activism, but doing so— they

argue— is merely a new form of distraction that prevents

substantive participation in democracy and stymies po-

litical change (see J. Dean 2010). Other scholars, how-

ever, are cautiously optimistic about the extent to which

social media, mobile devices, and other new media

technologies afford opportunities to redefine the pub-

lic sphere, formulate mediated publics around diverse

issues and identities, and develop new forms of political

engagement. Such possibilities are not automatic or in-

herent to new technologies, but they can manifest un-

der particular social and political conditions. One thing

is clear: just as earlier activists understood the pivotal

role of mass media in their efforts to transform political

life, as suggested by the infamous slogan “The Whole

World Is Watching,” today’s social and political move-

ments recognize the centrality of interactive digital me-

dia platforms. From WeChat’s role in political activism

in China to the use of Twitter by the Black Lives Matter

movement in the United States, new media technolo-

gies are equally integral to contemporary demands be-

ing made on the nation, the public, and the state.

Keywords for Media Studies, edited by Laurie Ouellette, and Jonathan Gray, New York University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/odu/detail.action?docID=4717750. Created from odu on 2022-09-01 00:12:00.

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