A sociocultural approach to study public connection across and beyond media

Abstract

This article presents an approach to cross-media use analysis suited to answering the question of how citizens from different sociocultural groups experience their freedom of information. The approach is based on normative democratic theory, is attentive to the dimensions of culture and media that lie beyond a predefined political dimension and is designed to analyse, from a citizen's perspective, how people experience a public world in which shared problems are addressed. To illustrate the approach, the article draws on the analysis of two empirical examples: one of a representative sample of the Norwegian citizenry (N ¼ 3660) and one of Norwegian students (N ¼ 1223). We conduct latent class analysis as well as multiple correspondence analysis to help improve our understanding of the consequences of fragmented and personalized media use by shedding light on the implications of changing patterns of public connection.

Distinction recapped: Digital news repertoires in the class structure

“…The results of this study present an alternative view to the psychological notion that news consumption is the result of individuals’ motivations and abilities that dominates current research on audience fragmentation and stratification of news media use (as argued by Ohlsson et al, 2017; Trilling and Schoenbach, 2013). The systematic distribution of “legitimate” and “illegitimate” news practices and preferences in the social space suggests, in line with previous Bourdieusian media research (Hovden and Moe, 2017; Lindell and Hovden, in-press), that habitus promotes the formation of news repertoires. The fact that people in the same social class share news repertoires—without any explicit coordination—highlights the pre-reflexive and fundamentally sociological character of people’s orientations in the media environment.…”

“…The Bourdieusian view contributes in as much as news repertoires are positioned in the wider social structure—that is, in relation to social positions and broader lifestyle and taste repertoires. It is against this backdrop that this study uses multiple correspondence analysis (henceforth MCA) to build upon the emerging research on the relationship between class and digital news repertoires (Hovden and Moe, 2017; Ohlsson et al, 2017; Lindell and Hovden, 2018). First, however, we must turn to the theoretical underpinnings of such an analysis.…”

“…The same pattern holds for turning to foreign news sources and getting news via a news application on a regular basis. The “cosmopolitan” taste for foreign news, media-savvy news, and information seeking and the taste for the “high-brow” newspapers correspond to a position of social privilege (Lindell and Hovden, 2018; Hovden and Moe, 2017; Rosenlund, 2015). In the digital high-choice media environment, these news practices are central markers of social distinction.…”

Between ritual and information: Three phases of Norwegian news audiences’ sense-making of the election of Donald Trump

“…The project was designed as a broadly oriented, explorative investigation of people's cross-media use (Schrøder, 2011) and public connection, from a socio-cultural perspective (Hovden and Moe, 2017). It was not, from the outset, designed for the specific research question of sense-making after destabilizing political events.…”

From pleasure to politics: Five functions of watching TV-series for public connection

“…In this article, I mobilize and develop the public connection perspective to illuminate how audience’s engagement with fictional entertainment can forge democratically desirable and manifest orientations to the sphere of politics. The public connection perspective has so far proved valuable in the study of how the use of news and factual media connect people to public and political life (Couldry et al, 2010; Hovden and Moe, 2017; Kaun, 2012; Markham and Couldry, 2007; Ong and Cabañes, 2011; Swart et al, 2017). Couldry et al (2010) conceptualize public connection as ‘an orientation towards a public world where matters of common concern are addressed’.…”