My Media Studies: Getting Political in a Global Digital Age Natalie Fenton ‘Media’ is now such a ubiquitous term that it is almost useless. It refers to all types of media organisation, all forms of media content and all channels of communication. New technology has given us the means to mediate everything with the potential for the media to be in all our imaginings. Media studies, in whatever form, are now more than ever, simply the study of society. And society is in serious disrepair. We are in the grips of neo-liberalism – a political system that is as much to do with institutional transformation as it is about understanding our sense of self and civic identities. As media studies scholars we need first to expose the fact that liberal democracy has failed in critical ways. In media studies, ‘being political’ is often cast as the ability of citizens to participate in a liberal democracy. In this frame a Habermasian approach to the public sphere is frequently invoked as the ethical horizon to which we should all strive (Habermas, 1989). Central to this debate is the right of citizens to engage freely in deliberation and come to a rational, critical interpretation. The extension of this act of deliberation is that the views of citizens are taken into account in political governance. In this manner the role of mediation and of representation (both cultural and political) is analysed and found wanting. Media studies have revealed a world (at least in the global north) that bears the scars of a thoroughly managed and mediated neo-liberal democracy. Media logic (Altheide and Snow, 1979) appears to be inextricably interwoven with market diktat. Put simply, if you want more people to know about something then you have to promote it. Contemporary systems of publicity operate via the media that are managed on the whole by markets and function largely at the behest of commercial interests. As the media-market combine takes hold, the notion of democracy itself becomes marketised. Exercising democracy becomes no more than exercising choice and the range we have to choose from is restricted by market principles. For example, within liberal democracies power is gained by winning elections. Winning elections requires persuasion, which means engaging in impression management on behalf of elite political actors. All news outlets are content hungry and news sources need to feed journalists relentlessly if they are to gain coverage. Journalists, desperate for news fodder with more space than ever before to fill and less time to do it, routinely access and privilege elite definitions of reality and are claimed to serve ruling hegemonic interests, legitimize social inequality and thwart participatory democracy. Considering dominant mediated discourses against material realities reveals stark contradictions. As neo-liberal democracy has failed so economic inequalities have increased. As inequality has increased so social mobility has fallen. As discourses of equality have risen in volume and intensity (consider the culture of much reality TV that espouses anyone, regardless of economic, social and cultural capital can be a star), so they have become less and less tangible. In the UK, since 1979, the proportion of national income of the bottom 30 per cent of the population has dropped from 17 per cent to 11 per cent; while income of the top 10 per cent has risen from little over 20 per cent to nearly 30 per cent. Minority ethnic groups are disproportionately concentrated in lower income groups. These inequalities are generally replicated in systems of health and education (Levitas, 2008). Similarly, discourses of citizenship and participation have increased as they have become less and less practised. Being political and enacting citizenship have become assimilated into and absorbed by the modes and contents of entertainment – personalisation, dramatisation, simplification and polarisation, a potentially anti-political civic privatism of individuals (Habermas, 2006). If media studies must do anything then it must analyse and explain the cultural and political significance of this neo-liberal market doctrine. To date, we have hardly scratched the surface. But where there are discernible structures of governance so there are always contradictions and ruptures - attempts to subvert and disrupt patterns of dominance. Even if public forms of understanding are being increasingly occupied by a neo-liberal assault on democratic forms of public space (Stevenson, 2008) there is always potential for critical forms of intervention; always the possibility for change. It has been argued that spaces for political engagement and/or participation have expanded in a digital mediascape. But often these spaces allow for no more than ‘clickable’ participation on short term and rapidly shifting issues that do not lend themselves to long standing commitments or deeply held loyalties, but a following that is also fleeting and momentary. This sort of issue drift whereby individuals or groups can shift focus from one issue to another or one website to another raises the question of whether global civil society has a memory that can retain a progressive collective political identity? Or, is there an emergent political being that resides in multiple belongings (people with overlapping memberships linked with polycentric networks); and flexible identities (characterised by inclusiveness and a positive emphasis on diversity and cross-fertilisation) that is as yet, barely appreciated? In short, through an analysis of some of the most basic concepts involved in thinking about media, politics and change my media studies of the next decade will be to thoroughly reconsider what it means to be political in a digitally mediated world. I hope I will be in good company. References Altheide, D.L. and R.P Snow (1979) Media Logic, Beverly Hills, Calif., Sage. Habermas, J. (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity. Habermas, J. (2006) ‘Political Communicaiton in Media Society – Does Democracy still enjoy an epistemic dimension? The impact of normative theory on empirical research.’ Paper presented to the ICA Annual Convention, 2006, Dresden, Germany. Levitas, R. (2008) Whatever happened to class politics? http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/class_and_culture/levitas.html (accessed July 2008) Stevenson, N. (2008) ‘Living in 'X Factor' Britain: Neo-liberalism and 'Educated' Publics’: http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/class_and_culture/stevenson.html (accessed July 2008) Biographical Note: Natalie Fenton is a Reader in Media and Communications in the Department of Media and Communication, Goldsmiths, University of London where she is also Co-Director of the Goldsmiths Media Research Programme: Spaces, Connections, Control, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and Co-Director of Goldsmiths Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy.