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Social Semiotics

ISSN: 1035-0330 (Print) 1470-1219 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csos20

Mediated Citizenship(s): An Introduction


Karin Wahl-Jorgensen
To cite this article: Karin Wahl-Jorgensen (2006) Mediated Citizenship(s): An Introduction,
Social Semiotics, 16:2, 197-203, DOI: 10.1080/10350330600664763
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10350330600664763

Published online: 20 Aug 2006.

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Date: 27 June 2016, At: 13:38

SOCIAL SEMIOTICS

VOLUME 16

NUMBER 2

(JUNE 2006)

Mediated Citizenship(s): An
Introduction

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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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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)

In this formulation, the notion of the public sphere celebrates a particular


kind of publicness: one characterised by unfettered rational/critical public

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deliberation on matters of common concern, and oriented towards consensus,


with the goal of holding policy-making authorities in the nation-state accountable for their actions. Several contributions published here engage critically
with the idea of the public sphere, illustrating the lasting power of its conceptual
richness, but also the limitations of strictly liberal, modernist and rationalist
constructions of citizenship. Taken together, these articles point us towards a
new ontology of mediated citizenship. In particular, several authors question the
adequacy of conceptions of citizenship that reify rationality and impartiality.
Instead, they demonstrate that political engagement often comes about as a
result of passionate feeling*/that political life is essentially and irreducibly
affective (Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen, 2000). This is not to deny the proper
place of reason and rationality in conceptions of citizenship. However, it is to
question the opposition between reason and emotion that underlies much
political theory. Barry Richards (2004) has pointed out that there is an
emotional deficit in political communication. That is to say, while the
dominant theoretical framework celebrates an ideal citizen who is rational,
impartial, and detached, we have much to gain from taking into consideration
the affective elements of citizenship. The paradigm of the rational citizen
might be neither normatively desirable nor empirically possible. Marcus,
Neuman, and MacKuen have suggested that emotion and reason interact to
produce a thoughtful and attentive citizenry (2000, 1). When we think about
what makes good citizens, in normative and practical terms, we must acknowledge that acts of citizenship do not arise from rational, detached observation,
but from a set of strong emotions, including anger, love, hate, and a sense of
injustice. As Jones argues, an overemphasis on the medias role as information
providers ignores the fact that the citizen is also just as likely to embrace
political material that expresses, reifies, confirms, or celebrates the core beliefs
and values he or she connects to the state, or those things that affirm his or her
identity as a citizen. To develop a more helpful understanding of citizen
political engagement with media, Jones draws on a ritual view of media
consumption, examining how acts of communication facilitate a sense of
identification, community/sociability, security/control, expression, pleasure/
entertainment, distraction, and even possession.
By paying more attention to how citizens actually engage with politics through
media, we can better understand the strengths and limitations of existing
opportunities for participation. Andy Ruddocks contribution to this issue
examines letters written to the British Conservative Party MP Boris Johnson
after he denounced residents of Liverpool for participating in a culture of
sentimentality. Johnson made this statement in the wake of widespread public
mourning after a local man, Ken Bigley, had been kidnapped and executed by
Iraqi militia. Ruddock argues that letter writers indicated a desire to see
themselves as parts of collectives solidified by sentiment and experience. They
did not feel that mediated politics create the symbolic resources to sustain such
affective relationships. Similarly, Pantti and van Zoonen highlight the need for
more nuanced analyses of the affective nature of political participation. Their

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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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relationship between citizens and public service media: should citizens be


provided with a range of critical perspectives, as the ABC insisted, or simply trust
those who claim to act in the public interest*/in particular, an elected
government fighting an unpopular war? To understand how citizenship is
constructed through such discourses, Nolan suggests that is necessary to
disarticulate actually existing citizenship, and the institutional practices that
shape it, from critical-normative definitions. In keeping with this insight, the
work featured here is either based centrally on empirical case studies or drawing
on extended empirical examples of specific practices of mediated citizenship.
They show us that citizenship is both an ongoing struggle and a site of lived
experience. There is still a scarcity of empirical work tracing concrete practices
of mediated citizenship, particularly those that come from the bottom up. Such
work is particularly important because, as this volume shows, those who have the
power to represent citizens from the top down do not necessarily speak for them
and their interests. Indeed, the idea of citizenship itself can be seen as a
Foucauldian discipline, employed by states to control subjects. In countries
including the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, immigrants aspiring
to citizenship status must undergo a test of their knowledge of topics such as the
organisation of government and the political parties, as well as of broader forms
of cultural capital, such as knowledge of major geographical features and, in the
case of Britain, where the Geordie, Cockney and Scouse dialects are spoken, and
how to pay a telephone bill. Such tests guarantee that subjects are normalised
not merely as political actors, but also as productive and compliant members of
society.
However, even if notions of citizenship are often constructed and policed by
hegemonic interests, media are also, as Simones contribution reminds us, the
primary locations for oppositional politics. In studying the womens peace group
CODEPINK, organised primarily online, she demonstrates that the Internet has
been crucial for the movements success: it has provided members of this
counterpublic with an indigenous medium, developed group consensus through
centralized organization and mobilization activities, and established access to
mainstream news media and the extensive publicity they provide.
A caveat is in order here. When we look at texts and textual practices, we are
accessing traces of activity rather than absences. This is a methodological
problem, but also a normative one: it means that it is extremely difficult for us to
access evidence of exclusions from mediated citizenship. We can look at
activists, netizens, media consumption, and rituals of public mourning, to
mention just a few examples. But we cannot see as easily who is excluded from
mediated citizenship, and how and why such exclusion occurs. Some of the
pieces grapple with this problem. Looking at the Chinese case, Yu points out that
the increased opportunities for open discussion through new media are not for
everyone, but rather for a privileged, well-educated, urban elite minority.
However, exclusions lie not merely at the point of access to participation, but
also in the concrete practices of communication that prevail in mediated forums.
For example, Janack demonstrates that participants on Howard Deans campaign

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blog*/designed as an egalitarian and open site for public discussion*/in fact


policed the boundaries of discussion, excluding those who did not conform to
strict requirements for appropriate conduct. In this context, participants only
accepted discussion on matters of campaign strategy and tactics, rather than
issues of substance. As such, participants themselves created a self-disciplining
system on the campaign site that maintained control over the campaigns
message and muted the potential for meaningful online political deliberation and
citizen participation.
More than anything, the pieces gathered here highlight the fact that the
notion of citizenship is itself infuriatingly complex, messy and problematic. At
the same time, they caution us to remain cognisant of the workings of political
power. Citizenship cannot merely be an empty vessel into which we pour all our
hopes and dreams*/or, alternatively, our nightmares. We also ought to retain the
principle that political efficacy matters to citizenship. Along those lines, even if
globalisation and new media technologies allow for the deterritorialisation of
political action, the articles published in this issue remind us that the rumours of
the nation-states demise are exaggerated. It remains the locus of political
activity, and also of efforts at defining, controlling, challenging and subverting
notions of citizenship. In Millers evocative phrase, the nation is a oneness of
imagination that binds citizens to states, transcending the everyday apparatus of
repression (1998, 28). At the same time, we cannot take the nation-state for
granted as an uncomplicated social fiction. Rosie and his colleagues show this, in
their examination of how newspapers distributed in England and Scotland invoke
the nation. They conclude that the UK press is in fact a complex mosaic of
explicit and implicit national titles. While newspapers circulating in Scotland
constantly flag the nation, reminding readers of their national identity,
publications based in England are more likely to take Englishness for granted and
leave it implied. As such, any claims to a straightforward national British press
are oversimplified, and the imagined communities constituted through mass
media comprise an unknown number of attentive publics, only some of which
may be regarded as national (Trenz 2004, 313). Nevertheless, any contemporary notion of mediated citizenship must come to terms with the fact that
democratic societies exist in a globalised world, and are inextricably linked to
larger political, economic and social realities (Benhabib 2002, 168). As Benhabib
comments, the complexity of our social lives integrates us into associations that
lie above and beyond the level of the nation state (Benhabib 2002, 169). In such
a conception, citizenship represents a form of collective identity expressed in
and through civil society, where we function as members of local communities,
activist groups, social movements, churches, and educational institutions, to
mention just a few such memberships. By viewing citizenship in such a
sense*/characterised by various thinkers as cosmopolitan or cultural
conceptions of citizenship*/we dispense with national exclusivity, dichotomous
forms of gendered and racial thinking and rigid separations between culture and
nature (Stevenson 2003). The mediated nature of citizenship has much to do
with how such tensions between spaces of political engagement are articulated.

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Haiqing Yu provides an excellent case study of the complex mediated interplay


between nation-states, citizens, and a globalised conception of justice, in her
study of Chinese online and popular discourses over rights. She suggests that
although citizens activities are strongly circumscribed and limited by state
actions, there is an emerging rights consciousness surrounding the freedom of
expression in China, and a growing movement to exercise the rights of citizenship, enacted through online communities that transcend national borders.
Together, these contributions show that the study of mediated citizenship(s)
challenges received frameworks of political, social, and media studies theory.
They tell us that there is much about both media and citizens that we do not yet
know. But more than anything, the contributions suggest that we cannot fully
understand citizenship without looking at the concrete workings of power in and
through mediated discourse.
Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University, UK

References
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political . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
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Habermas, Ju
rgen. 1974. The public sphere: An encyclopaedia article. New German
Critique 3:49/55.
*/*/*/. 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
media tell us about political participation . Buckingham: Open University Press.
Lister, Ruth. 1997. Citizenship: Feminist perspectives . London: Macmillan.
Marcus, G. E., W. R. Neuman, and M. MacKuen. 2000. Affective intelligence and political
judgment . Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.
Marshall, Thomas Humphrey. 1950. Citizenship and social class . Cambridge: Cambridge
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Miller, Toby. 1998. Technologies of truth: Cultural citizenship and the popular media .
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Richards, Barry. 2004. The emotional deficit in political communication. Political
Communication 21(3):339/352.
Stevenson, Nick. 2003. Cultural citizenship: Cosmopolitan questions . Maidenhead: Open
University Press.
Trenz, Hans-Jo
rg. 2004. Media coverage on European governance: Exploring the European
public sphere in national quality newspapers. European Journal of Communication
19(3):291/319.
van Zoonen, Liesbet. 2005. Entertaining the citizen: When politics and popular culture
converge . Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.

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