RESEARCH/ANALYSIS FINAL ASSIGNMENT
onthehunt2
34
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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