Media Consumption and Public Connection

Abstract

In Chapter 1, we reviewed the debates regarding the basis of the public’s engagement with democratic politics. We observed that, while there are many explanations of the so-called crisis in democracy, these generally focus on changes in political institutions and social structures; much less often is serious attention paid to the media. Yet at the heart of many of these explanations lies a set of assumptions about people’s ‘public connection’ — their lived relationship with public culture — which make little sense unless grounded in the material realities of people’s daily lives. Firmly embedded in these material realities are the symbolic realities of the media (Couldry 2005a; Silverstone 2005).¹