Peter Dahlgren
Television and Popular Civic Cultures: Public Sphere Perspectives
Abstract
With a focus on television, this text explores the conceptual tensions between popular culture and politics. Traditional notions of the public sphere are augmented with perspectives on civic cultures, which underscores, among other things, agency, identity and practices. Also, John Ellis’ notion of television as a socio-cultural and political ‘working through’ serves as a useful analytic link for understanding how the popular can feed into the political. The text mobilizes and compares contributions and arguments from several different authors, who stress that the radical bifurcation between politics and the popular leads us into a dead-end. At the same time, we do ourselves a disservice if we simply try to collapse one side into the other; we have to live creatively with the tension, reminding ourselves that neither politics nor popular culture are static phenomena. The final section strives to frame this viewpoint in terms of the several dimensions of the civic cultures.
Peter Dahlgren is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Lund University, Sweden. He has also taught in New York City and Stockholm, and has been a visiting scholar at several other universities. His work focuses on media and democracy, emphasising themes of participation, identity, and cultural change in late modernity. He is the author of many articles, as well as author or editor of several books, including Media and Political Engagement (2009) and Young Citizens and New Media (2007). E-mail: Peter.Dahlgren-AT-mkj.lu.se.