From entertainment to citizenship: Politics and popular culture 9781526102959

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POLITICS AND POPULAR CULTURE

AUTHOR DETAILS

The place of popular culture in politics, and its contribution to democratic life, has too often been misrepresented or misunderstood. This book provides the evidence and analysis that will help correct this misperception. It documents the voices of young people as they talk about popular culture, and as they reveal their thoughts about the world they inhabit. It will be of interest to those who study media and culture, and those who study politics.

Martin Scott is Lecturer in Media and International Development in the School of International Development at the University of East Anglia

John Street is Professor of Politics in the School of Political, Social and International Studies at the University of East Anglia Sanna Inthorn is Senior Lecturer in Society, Culture and Media in the School of Political, Social and International Studies at the University of East Anglia

Cover photo by Brett Mills

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

FROM ENTERTAINMENT TO CITIZENSHIP

From entertainment to citizenship reveals how the young use shows like X-factor to comment on how power ought to be used, and how they respond to those pop stars – like Bono and Bob Geldof – who claim to represent them. It explores how young people connect the pleasures of popular culture to the world at large. For them, popular culture is not simply a matter of escapism and entertainment, but of engagement too.

> POLITICS AND POPULAR CULTURE

There is a widespread concern about young people’s disengagement from politics, and a widespread assumption that part of the explanation for this disengagement is mass media in general and popular culture in particular. This book challenges both assumptions. Drawing on research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, it provides the first detailed study of how young people in Britain use popular culture to shape and express their political views and values.

STREET, INTHORN & SCOTT

> FROM ENTERTAINMENT > TO CITIZENSHIP

>FROM ENTERTAINMENT >TO CITIZENSHIP >

POLITICS AND POPULAR CULTURE

JOHN STREET, SANNA INTHORN AND MARTIN SCOTT

From entertainment to citizenship

From entertainment to citizenship Politics and popular culture John Street, Sanna Inthorn and Martin Scott

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright © John Street, Sanna Inthorn and Martin Scott 2013 The right of John Street, Sanna Inthorn and Martin Scott to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN  978 0 7190 8538 3 hardback First published 2013 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

page vi

 1. Introduction 1   2. Politics and popular culture 8   3. Citizenship and popular culture 24   4. Researching young people, politics and popular culture 38   5. Points of engagement: reading the politics within popular culture54   6. Real power 70   7. Young citizens and celebrity politicians 86   8. Altogether now: creating collective identities 104   9. Playing with citizenship 120 10. Conclusion 135 Bibliography145 Index161

Acknowledgements

We have incurred many debts in the course of writing this book. We owe thanks to the Economic and Social Research Council for funding the project on which we report here (RES-000-22-2700). And in getting and administering the project, we depended greatly on the contribution of Rowena Burgess and Sarah Burbridge in the Arts and Humanities Research Office at the University of East Anglia. We are also immensely grateful to those who participated in our research. In particular, we wish to thank Dick Allen and the students of Bungay High School, Rebecca Bealey and the students of Norwich School for Girls, Duncan Joseph and the students of Wymondham High School, Gary Seal and Thea Abbott and the students of City of Norwich School, and Melissa Severn and the students of Chadwell Heath School. Others to whom we owe debts are Carole Bull, Stephen Coleman, Nicola Daines, Tim Dant, Charmain Desler, John Gordon, Alan Turkie and Liesbet van Zoonen. Earlier versions of some of the material included were delivered to audiences at conferences organised by the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change; the International Communication Association; the Political Studies Association; the Media Education, Communication and Cultural Studies Association; and to the Schools of Film and Television Studies and Political, Social and International Studies at the University of East Anglia. We extend many thanks to Tony Mason and his colleagues at Manchester University Press for their support and help. Finally, we are grateful to our colleagues in our respective schools at the University of East Anglia and to those in media@uea, a network that extends across institutional and disciplinary boundaries. Some of the following chapters draw on previously published papers.  We would like to thank the editors and publishers of the following:

Acknowledgements

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Martin Scott, Sanna Inthorn and John Street (2011) ‘From Entertainment to Citizenship: A Comparative Study of the Political Uses of Popular Culture’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 14:5, 499–515. John Street, Sanna Inthorn and Martin Scott (2012) ‘Playing at Politics: Popular Culture and Political Engagement’, Parliamentary Affairs, 65:2, 338–358. Sanna Inthorn and John Street (2011) ‘Simon Cowell for Prime Minister: Young Citizens’ Attitudes Towards Celebrity Politics’, Media, Culture and Society, 33:3, 479–489. John Street and Sanna Inthorn (2010) ‘“You’re an American Rapper, So What do you Know?” The Political Uses of British and US Popular Culture by First-time Voters in the UK’, New Political Science, 32:4, 471–484.

1

Introduction

The links between popular culture and politics are often referred to – sometimes dismissively, sometimes seriously. They are dismissed when it is thought that popular culture diminishes politics. When politicians appear, for example, on reality television shows – whether Big Brother or Strictly Come Dancing – the assumption is that what they are doing is a desperate attempt to appear ‘relevant’ or to revive a flagging career. Such stunts serve only, it is suggested, to lower the public’s respect for an already tainted profession. But there are occasions, by contrast, when the link between politics and popular culture is taken with the utmost seriousness. During the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, much was made of the role played by music and musicians in inspiring the rebellion in Tunisia or the crowds that gathered in Tahrir Square in Cairo. In a similar way, seriousness is frequently accorded to the efforts of film stars such as George Clooney and Angelina Jolie, or rock stars like Bono and Bruce Springsteen, to address injustice in the world. However, whether the connection between popular culture and politics is casually mocked or earnestly regarded, it is less commonly studied in detail. This book is dedicated to doing just this. From entertainment to citizenship looks at how ‘politics’, itself an ambiguous and multifaceted term, features in the content of popular culture – from soap operas to pop songs to video games. But it also reveals how the forms of popular culture are themselves understood and used as forms of political engagement. It is one thing for academic analysts to point to the ‘messages’ encoded in a cultural text; it is quite another to say that these revealed meanings are shared by audiences and fans. And it is the latter to which this book is dedicated. It is an attempt to reveal the routine, daily transactions between popular culture and politics. The research project that underpins this book sprang from a desire

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FROM ENTERTAINMENT TO CITIZENSHIP

to understand whether popular entertainment actually informed and animated people’s relationship to the political world. Rather than to assume that popular culture was necessarily political (or apolitical), we wanted to ask whether – in the routine pleasures of popular culture – there were moments when lessons were learnt about how the world works and how power operates, when affinities were formed with groups of distant others, and when passions were stirred about injustice or unfairness. We wanted to see if, as many had suggested but few had demonstrated, popular culture did contribute to our lives as citizens. Was it possible that popular culture, commercially produced entertainment, played as important a role in the political realm as it is assumed that news programmes do? And more than this: we were curious about whether forms of popular culture differed in what they allow for (or thwart) in terms of political engagement? Our book is, we believe, the first to ask whether types of popular culture differ in their ability to engage with politics. Much of what has been written in this area has looked at entertainment television; we wanted to go beyond this, to examine music and video games as well. In comparing the capacity of different forms of popular culture to link to politics, we concentrate on a distinct group of people: first-time voters, young people aged 17–18 years old. Our focus on young people is inspired by two thoughts. The first is that they are often portrayed as the most politically disenchanted of all generations. The widely voiced concern about the ‘crisis of democracy’ tends to focus, in particular, upon the young. In the UK, a commission was set up in 2007 precisely to address this anxiety (Tonge and Mycock 2010). The second thought is that the young tend to be the most dedicated and enthusiastic consumers of popular culture, and indeed the two phenomena – the political and the cultural – are often linked. Time spent on entertainment detracts from time spent as an active citizen (Putnam 2000). Like others (Norris 2000; Dalton 2008), we found this general picture to be some way from the truth. Nonetheless, the common perception is widespread, and the true picture complicated, and thus there is a powerful case for closer scrutiny of how and when popular culture and politics interact in the lives of our future citizens. From popular culture to politics As we have noted, we are not the first to venture down this path. Two decades or so ago, it might have been true to say that, among many social scientists, there was only a passing interest in the political sig-

Introduction

3

nificance of popular culture. More recently, this situation has changed considerably. Initially, as popular culture has been taken more seriously, two sharply demarcated sides have emerged. On the one hand, there are those who see popular culture as distorting, or detrimental to, political engagement. Writers like Douglas Kellner (1995) portrayed popular culture – most notably, Hollywood films – as serving the dominant interests in the way they ‘transcoded’ US foreign policy anxieties into blockbusters like First Blood or Top Gun. Other writers, most notably Robert Putnam (2000), although also concerned with the ‘messages’ encoded in entertainment, focused in particular upon the disengaging effects of popular culture. These negative accounts of the impact of mass entertainment provoked counter claims in which popular culture was seen as serving democracy and political e­ ngagement (Jones 2005; van Zoonen 2005). Increasingly, though, this stand-off between two opposing sides has been replaced, not by a happy consensus, but rather by a more nuanced approach, in which the question is about the multiple, often contradictory ways in which politics and popular culture intersect (see, for example, Couldry et al. 2010). Our book is very much in this tradition. We see popular culture neither as an unalloyed political good or evil. More importantly, we do not see the answer to the question of how popular culture and politics relate as lying solely in the content of the culture itself, but rather also in the interpretation and use of it by audiences and fans. For this reason, the research reported here concentrates on the way in which young people talk about the popular culture they enjoy (and dislike). It is this talk that forms the core of our enquiry; it is here, we argue, that links are forged with the political realm and ­political thoughts and values are articulated. Our research breaks new ground, as we have mentioned, in its comparison of different forms of popular culture and in its detailed examination of how young people’s cultural tastes and practices reveal a political dimension. Where others have concentrated on a single form of culture, whether television or music, we consider both of these and video games. Comparison of this kind helps to highlight what it is about or within popular culture that allows it to become linked to politics. And concentrating on talk allows us to listen intently to what young people say about their cultural lives, rather than to read those lives from the cultural texts. What we hope to show is that popular culture does indeed allow young people to think about, and reflect upon, politics as it is conventionally understood – as the business of governments and parties. It also

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FROM ENTERTAINMENT TO CITIZENSHIP

enables them to feel connected to others, to form communities of interest, which have claims upon the political realm, and to feel animated about those claims. But in showing this, we also demonstrate how different forms of culture make these things possible in different ways and to different extents. Our research reveals that the links between politics and popular culture are not permanent and persistent features of the relationship between the two. They are dependent on many intervening variables, not least the aesthetic judgements of our respondents. Nonetheless, our core claim is that the pleasures of popular culture are closely allied with the ways in which citizenship is lived. In making this case for the link between popular culture and politics (and especially citizenship), one of the issues that has most occupied us, and those with whom we have discussed our research, is what we mean by ‘politics’. How can casual conversations about soap operas and reality television, or about pop songs and video games, have any bearing on politics? This is a question to which we return throughout the book. Suffice it to say here that while we treat ‘politics’ as that realm occupied by governments, parties and bureaucracies, in which the right to allocate resources is fought over, we also see politics as the pursuit of collective interests and as the struggle between competing ideologies. As Kum-Kum Bhavnani (1991: 52) wrote in an earlier study of young people and politics: Economic and social relations both help comprise the domain of politics. This argument provides a definition of politics: politics can be defined as being the means by which human beings regulate, attempt to regulate and challenge with a view to changing unequal power relations.

For us too, politics is oriented towards the public operation of power in respect of collective or communal interests and identities. And in this respect we follow Colin Hay (2007), who defines politics as that which takes place when people, faced with a choice, deliberate with others about their decision. To define politics like this has two important implications. The first is that it is not everywhere – in other words, we reject the suggestion that ‘everything is political’ on the grounds that this risks emptying it of all meaning. Equally, politics is not confined to the formally designated arenas – the ones that once occupied textbooks of political science (parliament, the parties, the civil service, the cabinet, pressure groups). Politics can exist outside these realms – in the operation of the media, most obviously – where public power is at stake. This approach to politics is designed to establish a common ground between traditional political science and cultural studies. It is designed

5

Introduction

to avoid the excessive inclusiveness of the latter and equivalent exclusiveness of the former. It is about creating the conditions for a dialogue across disciplines, and to allow each to learn from the other. More than this, our definition is designed to allow for the thought that politics is absent from conversations about popular culture, and that people may be, in Couldry and his colleagues’ word (2010), ‘unconnected’ to the public realm and to its politics. What follows, therefore, is an account of how our research – funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and conducted in 2008– 2009 – enabled us to look in more detail and depth into the role of popular culture in politics, and to ask when and whether it contributed to the formation of democratic citizenship. There are three dimensions to this contribution. The first is the extent to which popular culture is seen as providing knowledge of the world with which politics is traditionally occupied. Put simply: what is learnt about political reality from popular culture? The second dimension has to do with popular culture’s capacity to make people aware of communities of interest to which they might belong. If the first dimension refers to the cognitive, this refers to the affinitive. The final dimension has to do with how knowledge and affinities are animated by a sense of justice or otherwise. This refers to the affective feelings that people have about the reality they imagine and the affinities they share. These three dimensions form the ­organising principles of the chapters that follow. The structure of the book The first two chapters place our project in its wider context. Chapter 2 traces the links that have been established over time between politics and popular culture, concentrating especially upon the debates provoked by the Frankfurt School from the 1940s onwards. The chapter incorporates a discussion of how, in the playing out of arguments about the politics of popular culture, the key terms ‘culture’ and ‘politics’ are themselves being reconfigured. Chapter 3 focuses on an equally important aspect of the context into which our research fits. This is the way in which citizenship has been linked to media and culture. Traditional accounts of citizenship have typically seen it to derive from the allocation of formally designated political rights. But following T. H. Marshall (1950) and others, the conception of citizenship has become broader, as has our understanding of the processes that shape it. This chapter documents the development of our understanding of how media and culture relate to citizenship, and hence sets the background to our research.

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FROM ENTERTAINMENT TO CITIZENSHIP

Chapter 4 describes the details of our research practice, explaining the methods we used and relating them to other work in this field. It reports too on a small survey that we conducted with our young participants, which is revealing of their tastes, habits and political attitudes. The remaining chapters document in detail the different aspects of young people’s relationship to popular culture and its relevance to their sense of citizenship. We begin in Chapter 5 with a discussion of the ways in which the popular culture that they enjoy represents the wider world and seeks to engage them in it (or distance them from it). We then explore, in Chapter 6, the extent to which young people use popular culture to make sense of the ‘real world’ and the operation of power within it. Do they see soap operas as ‘realistic’, or do they understand the judges on The X Factor or The Apprentice as having expertise and knowledge about how the world really works? Chapter 7 pursues this latter question further by asking whether, when the stars of popular culture behave as ‘celebrity politicians’, they are taken seriously by young audiences. Our findings suggest that young people accord some celebrities the right to lead or ‘represent’ them, but that this right is granted cautiously and conservatively. The chapter reveals how, in observing celebrity politicians, our respondents construct their own understanding of what is required of a politician. The representative claim that emerges in celebrity politics is itself dependent on some notion of a collective identity, of a set of interests to be represented. Chapter 8 describes how our participants use forms of popular culture to construct a sense of collective identity. Key to our argument throughout is that popular culture is not merely a means of ‘mirroring’ reality or ‘expressing’ identity, but rather of constructing them. Just as important, we suggest, is the role that popular culture has in animating these constructions. Our last substantive chapter draws attention to the way in which popular culture is used in articulating emotional reactions to types of political behaviour. It also explores the relationship between pleasure – most notably, laughter – and politics. Both emotions and pleasure are neglected in much social science research, despite their importance to the routines of everyday life. And for us, they constitute vitally important elements to the relationship we explore between popular culture and politics. Our main research was conducted in 2008–09, before the emergence of the Occupy Movement in 2010 and the UK riots in 2011. We do not pretend that we anticipated these events in the conversations we had with young people, but the various forms of social and political disruption of the last few years

Introduction

7

are indicative of how passion and popular culture become emmeshed with the ‘real world’ of politics. Over the course of our research, we heard – in the group discussions and individual interviews that we conducted with young citizens – popular culture emerge as an important site for the articulation and exploration of politics. We also saw how the passions aroused by popular culture were channelled into political sentiments. The political attitudes and feelings that popular culture provoked may have been confused and contradictory (as they are, we suspect, for us all), but what we witnessed was how the ‘serious’ world of politics and the ‘trivial’ one of entertainment feed off each other in the lives of young people. The relationship is a complex one, but crucially important if we are to understand the multiple ways in which citizenship is formed, and the particular contribution made by music, video games and e­ ntertainment television.

2

Politics and popular culture

How has popular culture become linked to politics? How is it that a form of life often associated with fun and escapism, and often labelled as ‘mere entertainment’, can be connected with the serious (sometimes deadly serious) world of politics? These questions lie at the heart of this book. Understanding how the two realms of politics and popular culture come to be linked is key to appreciating the issues that are raised by our argument that popular culture can be an important element in political engagement. There are many competing conceptions of popular culture – from folk to mass forms. Our concern is with the latter. When we talk of ‘popular culture’ we mean mass-produced or mass-consumed forms of entertainment – such as video games, popular music, Hollywood movies, talent shows, soap operas and situation comedies. Although we are aware that news media of various types might reasonably be deemed a form of ‘popular culture’, our concern is not with them. Equally, we are not concerned with forms of folk culture, which, while ‘popular’ in an important sense (as part of the routines of ordinary life), are not part of a process of large-scale production and consumption. We are interested in forms of culture and entertainment that do not appear, at least at first glance, to have any direct bearing on the ‘real world’ of politics; those forms of culture that seem more intent upon providing a distraction or an escape from everyday reality, that are part of leisure rather than work (at least for its consumers). This chapter traces the histories and the theories that frame the link between politics and popular culture, and which give rise to the research questions that we address here. In the following pages, we also reveal how, in forging the connection between apparently very different realms of human life, we encounter competing notions of the key terms. What is meant by both ‘politics’ and ‘popular culture’ is a product of

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various legacies and perspectives, not all of which can be reconciled into a single vision. Sometimes politics emerges as the traditional business of the exercise of public power by parties and governments, by legislators and executives (and their administrations). Sometimes politics refers to all relations between people, in which power – both public and private – is being contested. Equally, popular culture sometimes appears as the product of the imagination and creativity of audiences and artists. Sometimes it is the more or less cynical product of the marketing and commercial skills of the media and culture industries. These very different conceptions are, as we say, a product of the rival traditions of thought and practice that are applied to the relationship between the two. These various approaches provide the background to this book. They help to explain how, for some writers, it becomes reasonable to ask whether entertainment might lead to citizenship, just as they help to account for the doubts raised by others, for whom citizenship is simply a matter of the rights granted by the constitution and determined by the law. For the latter, the entertainment industry is of no relevance. We ourselves adopt the former position, one associated with the socalled ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences (Butler 1997; Nash 2000, 2001; Goodin and Tilly 2008). To focus on culture is to question accounts of human behaviour that either see it as determined by material conditions or as the product of individual rational action. Rather, it suggests that social action is the product of shared meanings and values, which are not reducible to ‘economic reality’ or ‘individual preferences’. Such an approach has important implications for the way in which popular culture is viewed. It allows entertainment to be seen as a possible source of those shared meanings and values. It also, though, allows culture to be understood as a site of political action. Rather than trace this general shift in social scientific thought, we concentrate here upon how its impact can be detected in the particular context of the relationship between popular culture and politics. Origins of the cultural turn One answer to the question of how popular culture and politics came to be linked is to counter with another question: when were they ever not linked? In Ancient Greece, Plato (1961) warned of the dangers for rational thought of the seductive power of music and poetry. While this tradition continues in the works of Rousseau, Nietzsche and others, it tends to fade from view within mainstream political thought. It is kept

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FROM ENTERTAINMENT TO CITIZENSHIP

alive elsewhere, however, most notably in literary criticism, where, in the twentieth century, its most well-known exponent is F. R. Leavis (1952: 184), who wrote in The Common Pursuit of how the study of literature was also ‘an intimate study of the complexities, potentialities and essential conditions of human nature’. And it is this perspective that plays a profound part in shaping the discipline of cultural studies, particularly in the Anglo-American tradition. Culture is seen as giving ‘voice’ to perceptions, experiences and judgements of the world, and to the uniting of the aesthetic and the socio-political. Cultural studies is also influenced by the work of historians – those not solely concerned with the business of kings and queens – who give culture a prominent place in their accounts of social change. E. P. Thompson’s (1963) magisterial The Making of the English Working Class tells of how class identities are forged, and political battles fought, in song and stories. More recently, Jonathan Rose (2010), in his The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class, has documented in meticulous detail the cultural lives of men and women, and how their encounters with the arts fed into their awareness of, and relationship to, the wider social order. And other historians like Linda Colley (1992) and Tim Blanning (2002) have given culture a similar starring role in their accounts of the rise (and fall) of nations. In placing culture at the centre of their narratives, these histories see it as an expression of experiences, a means of comprehension, and a form of political action. Culture does not just provide an element of ‘local colour’, a way of illustrating the underlying material reality. It is part of the lived experience; it is a part of politics. In suggesting that culture is an inextricable part of political life, we are working with a particular understanding of culture, one that draws on Raymond Williams’s (1981) three-dimensional account. It is Williams who comes to embody the tradition of cultural studies traced here. As is well known, Williams argues that ‘culture’ incorporates our familiar notion of works of art – representations of ourselves and our world. But it also includes the idea of culture as a ‘form of life’, the unspoken and undocumented, although very real nonetheless, rules that organise the co-existence of communities. And finally, culture refers to the active process of becoming ‘cultured’, most familiarly associated with the idea of education (and with Leavis’s moralism). Here culture represents the development of sensitivities and sensibilities that enrich human existence. These three dimensions of culture ground the possibility of the permanent and persisting alliance of it and politics. By attaching culture to how we see, experience and judge our world

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11

the link to politics is, in a sense, straightforward – culture becomes a form of political commentary. Or it would be, were it not for a crucial feature of contemporary culture: its commodification and commercialisation. There is, within Williams’s account, the notion of culture as an organic form that is produced within, and by, human subjects. There is a strong sense of ‘folk culture’. While this was not Williams’s own view, he too wrestled with the implications for culture of its increasingly technological and ‘mass’ character. These factors have marked current thinking about the link between politics and popular culture, whatever the evidence of more persisting connections. Williams’s (1977) approach, as he acknowledged, drew upon both Marxism and Leavisite literary criticism. It was both materialist and moralistic. It saw culture as a fundamental site of class struggle, as a place in which control and resistance were articulated. But he also saw culture as a site of moral and emotional engagement, as a place in which struggle was felt, in which it acquired meaning. It is only in understanding these two aspects of culture – the moral and material – that we can understand how intimately it becomes connected to politics. Williams represented one current of thought that led from Marxism to culture. There were others. One of the most notable of these was that associated with the Frankfurt School, and the tradition of critical theory that it did so much to establish. Founded in Germany in the 1920s, but re-locating to the US during World War II, the School highlighted the importance of culture to our understanding of human thought and action. Rather than drawing upon literary criticism to give it a critical edge, the Frankfurt scholars turned to Sigmund Freud to perform this role. Freud’s (2004) account of the suppressed desires that were necessary to the maintenance of social order, most obvious in his Civilisation and its Discontents, was used by the Frankfurt scholars to critique contemporary capitalism. The urge to challenge an unjust, exploitative regime was subverted by the production of consumer goods – and especially cultural goods – that appeared to satisfy human desires at their most fundamental level. In the writings of Theodor Adorno (2002), in particular, capitalism’s capacity to sustain itself derives from culture’s ability to penetrate into the deepest of human emotions and to manipulate them so that, rather than challenging capitalism, it is embraced. Culture and politics are linked, in this account, ideologically. What the Frankfurt School also added to the discussion of culture’s political role was the term ‘the culture industry’, the recognition that we were not dealing with ‘folk culture’, but rather with mass produced culture. Adorno and his colleagues argued that the commodification

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FROM ENTERTAINMENT TO CITIZENSHIP

of culture profoundly altered the latter’s politics, even where, as in the case of Walter Benjamin (1999), they disagreed about the nature of the transformation. A founding text of the debate is Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s 1944 essay (1979) ‘Enlightenment as Mass Deception’. In identifying the production of culture as an industrial process, they draw attention to the incentives that determine its production. Key to this is the need for standardisation, without which mass production of culture is impossible. At the same time, they are insistent that, as culture, the products of the culture industries retain an ideological function. This is performed in part by the ‘lessons’ which audiences are expected to derive from the content (the punishment meted out to Donald Duck provides a guide to audiences as to what will happen to them if they step out of line); from the aspirations that are fostered in them – the triumph of mediocrity; and in the illusions they create – that audiences have an infinite choice, and hence ‘freedom’. These features of mass culture are contrasted, implicitly and explicitly (especially in Adorno’s later work), with an alternative cultural life in which culture serves to deny the common sense of capitalism and to point to a different social order. Adorno and Horkheimer’s rather bleak account of mass culture’s political role is challenged by Benjamin (1999), who identifies in the advent of the technologies of reproduction, the democratisation of art’s elitist aura. But despite their differences they retain the assumption that industrialised culture constitutes much more than an innocent distraction, a matter of ‘mere entertainment’. It represents a site in which political thoughts and actions are shaped. The same idea is evident in the writings of another key figure in this tradition and in this historical period, the Italian writer Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci refused to embrace the bleak economic determinism of some Marxist thought, and wanted to stress the importance of myths and ideas in the exercise of power – and in challenges to it. Gramsci’s (1998) notion of hegemony presents culture as a site of struggle. The conflict is that between a ‘common sense’ that supports the status quo, and a counter narrative that challenges the existing order. These ideas come to be focused more precisely upon popular culture in the research that emerges from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in the late 1960s and 1970s. While not challenging Adorno’s claims about industrialised mass culture in general, CCCS invests subcultures – in the guise of teddy boys, mods, punks, hippies, rastas and others – with a capacity to act as sites of resistance. Here, routine cultural practices become forms of

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political resistance. Using style to shock and subvert capitalist norms, subcultures represented the ability of culture to engage positively with the dominant political order. This engagement may be momentary (the culture is quickly reincorporated into the mainstream) and may be located outside the formal centres of power, but for the CCCS and the many scholars who followed in their wake, the subculture became the epitome of what it meant to talk of the politics–culture connection. While Adorno and the CCCS may have focused on very different features of contemporary culture and, as a result, may have drawn very different conclusions, they shared the sense that culture was a key site of politics, whether in the form of engagement or disengagement. They share too, although this is less often explicit, an approach which requires them to distinguish between types of culture, not simply with respect to some notion of taste or preference, but rather with regard to its politics. So it is that Adorno discriminates between serious and popular music, investing the former with the capacity to articulate a sense of the alternatives to which humans might aspire, while the latter ensures their continued subservience. In the same way, the CCCS find in subcultures a potential that is – by implication, rather than by explicit statement – missing in the mainstream. In other words, this approach to the politics of culture is not just inspired by a theory of social and political change, but of aesthetic judgement too. In sharing this perspective, they also shared a common set of Marxist assumptions, in which culture’s political significance was determined by its role in managing capitalist class relations. It is important to recognise, however, that claims for the political importance of popular culture do not derive solely from Marxism. There is an equivalent tradition on the right, taking its lead from Plato, that also points to the politically enervating effect of popular culture. Writers such as Allan Bloom, Neil Postman and Roger Scruton have all identified the diverse ways in which popular culture harms the capacity of individuals to live a better life. And like Adorno and the CCCS, their arguments depend largely on the way they read the culture. It is via his reading of contemporary popular culture that Postman (1987) can talk of ‘amusing ourselves to death’, or Bloom (1987) of the ‘closing of the American mind’, or Scruton (1998) of ‘yoofanasia’. These fates are not matters of aesthetic decline, but of political decline too. Whether voiced by the left or the right, these accounts of popular culture place it in direct relation to politics. The commercial products of the culture industry are seen to mediate the relationships people have with each other and with the wider social system, whether in the

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form of education or work. Popular culture becomes a means by which dispositions to the system are organised. It is, in this sense, profoundly political, both in terms of ideology and action. But it is precisely this strong political claim that becomes the object of subsequent criticism. Much of this is directed at the subcultural tradition, but it has relevance to all those who link culture to politics (including the conservative critique of popular culture). Beyond subcultures? There have been, for instance, feminist critiques of the politics of subcultural practice; or Marxist critiques of the overinvestment in culture; or political economist critiques of the CCCS’s apparent indifference to the mechanism of cultural production; or cultural critiques of the neglect of the ‘mainstream’ (see Gelder and Thornton 1997; Gelder 2005). More recently, the notion of subculture has itself been called into question by researchers who prefer to characterise cultural practice by reference to ‘neo-tribes’ (Bennett 1999) or ‘scenes’ (Straw 1991) or ‘genres’ (Hesmondhalgh, 2005). For some – like Bennett – their revisionism has been about de-politicising subcultures, arguing that such groups should be understood as more amorphous social formations with no political agenda. For others – like Hesmondhalgh – it has been about repoliticising subcultures by re-configuring them in generic terms. But rather than following the twists and turns of post-subcultural analysis, we suggest that a more fruitful path might be found in a writer who, while himself schooled at CCCS, links popular culture to mainstream politics, rather than the momentary and marginal politics of subcultures. Lawrence Grossberg’s (1992) We Gotta Get Out of This Place relocates the CCCS tradition within a post-structuralist one, in which he tracks the capacity of music (in particular) to articulate the politics of the first stirrings of neoliberalism. He writes (1992: 69): ‘Popular culture is a significant and effective part of the material reality of history, effectively shaping the possibilities of our existence.’ And from this premise, he detects in the late 1980s that popular culture is implicated in reconstituting ‘the structure of authority and the configuration of everyday life’ in ways that accord with ‘the new conservatism’ (Grossberg 1992: 239). More recently, Grossberg (2002) has re-stated his case in a withering critique of cultural studies (and popular music studies in particular) for deserting the political agenda that inspired the founders of CCCS. Grossberg’s fundamental claim is that popular culture animates sensibilities – structures of feeling – that are directly

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expressed in mainstream political ideologies and practices. But while Grossberg’s densely written and complex theoretical approach to the study of popular culture’s relationship to politics is rich in ideas and arguments, it is relatively light on empirical detail. There is very little research into the meaning that popular culture has for its audiences, or – more tellingly – how music or movies actually give form to political sentiments. Nonetheless, Grossberg’s approach represents an important perspective on the relationship of politics to popular culture. At the level of politics, he has shifted the focus from transitory cultural skirmishes to the ideological currents that seek to dominate entire societies. And at the level of culture, he has shifted attention away from the fringes of cultural fashion to the mainstream. The gap that is left – the empirical detail – comes to be filled by another tradition of scholarship concerned with political action of an increasingly familiar kind, that of social movements. Social movements and popular culture Social movement theory (SMT) has proved very receptive to those who contend that culture has a place in explaining social and political action. The problem posed by ‘the logic of collective action’ (Olson 1965), that there is a disincentive for rational individuals to join a movement that, if successful, will benefit them whether or not they are members, has led SMT scholars to focus upon how movements can reduce the cost, or increase the incentives, of membership. One set of answers has been found by focusing on the uses to which culture has been put in reducing information costs and in inducing a sense of collective interest (Melucci, 1989; Nash, 2000). Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison (1998) have highlighted the particular part played by music and musicians in engendering collective action. Musicians serve to ‘bear witness’ to the cause, while music articulates the sense of community to which the movement appeals. Marc Steinberg’s (2004) account of student protests in Serbia draws upon the suggestion that music can give substance to otherwise inchoate political sentiments. This argument has been developed further by Kevin McDonald (2006) who re-describes social movements as ‘experience movements’, and argues that culture is key to their realisation as such. These writers all add flesh to Grossberg’s theoretical bones. Social movement theory, in this incarnation, draws culture into intimate alliance with political action. It suggests that culture not only

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expresses a set of political ideas, but also animates political action. However, its capacity to do this is framed by the pre-existing political formations within which culture operates. Indeed, Eyerman and Jamison argue that it is the social movement, as much as anything, which invests the culture with political significance. The culture on its own is seen, from this perspective, as lacking in independent political significance. It acquires this by the context provided by the social movement. In other words, it is the civil rights movement that gives the soul music of the 1960s its political meaning and value, as much as the other way round. The music nonetheless is important to articulating the ambitions of the political struggle. So while the claims made by Eyerman and Jamison for the contribution provided by culture are located in the practices of specific social movements and cultural actors, they move us beyond Grossberg’s more abstract speculations. Nonetheless they remain silent on precisely how music has the impact imputed to it. Or put another way, their approach does not explain how and why particular musicians are selected over others to play the role of ‘truth bearers’, nor how and why particular sounds resonate more strongly with the movement’s political ambitions. The SMT approach tells us relatively little about how culture ‘works’ in mobilising political action. Social movement theory, therefore, represents an important stage in the developing links between politics and popular culture. It sees mass produced popular music, and its stars, as having a role in an explicitly public, political struggle. This role is, furthermore, not confined to providing only a ‘soundtrack’, an illustrative footnote, but to participating in politically significant ways in how people think and act. But while these strong claims are made, the question still remains as to exactly how (or indeed whether) commercially produced culture can have the effects attributed to it. Popular culture and civic engagement: the case of Robert Putnam There are, however, those who do venture just such an explanation, who seek to show how culture acts upon people’s political behaviour. Robert Putnam represents one of the most systematic of these attempts to ground popular culture’s contribution to political thought and action. First in his study of Italian politics, Making Democracy Work (1993) and subsequently in the much better known Bowling Alone (2000), Putnam documents the process by which individuals become citizens. In Making Democracy Work, he demonstrates how engagement

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in sport and in choral singing, among other things, generates in citizens both a willingness and a capacity to participate in democracy. The ideas formulated in this earlier study form the basis for Bowling Alone, his analysis of civic engagement and social capital in the US. But where the first volume tells of the factors that enable democracy to work, the subsequent book focuses upon the factors that conspire against democratic practice – by which he means civic engagement. Although he considers many possible culprits, his prime suspect is entertainment television. It stands accused not simply of taking time away from collective civic activity, but of fostering attitudes that compound this tendency. Bowling Alone documents the multiple ways in which a penchant for entertainment television leads to a propensity to a solitary, privatised existence, and the erosion of social capital. Putnam’s argument is that entertainment television is detrimental to civic engagement, and that this has a further adverse effect on politics, whether in the specific form of voting or more generally as deliberation. The evidence derives from analysis of large-scale survey datasets in which, among other things, watching entertainment television correlates with various types of antisocial or uncivic behaviour. What Putnam appears to demonstrate empirically is that popular entertainment works against citizenship and civic engagement. In doing so, he grounds the connection between particular political activities and types of popular culture in a way that few of his predecessors have done. Not that this achievement has been universally acknowledged and acclaimed. Peter Hall (1999), for instance, has claimed that Putnam’s results are not replicated in the UK. And Pippa Norris (2000) has cast doubts on their validity for the US. But these criticisms, important though they are, do not invalidate Putnam’s association of popular culture and political participation. Neither Norris nor Hall looks at popular culture as such. Indeed, Norris (2000: 5) explicitly discounts it, concentrating only on news and current affairs media. Until relatively recently, there has remained, as John Besley (2006: 43) has noted, an absence of detailed empirical research into the relationship between popular culture and civic engagement: ‘Whereas the relationship between news media use and civic engagement has been studied extensively, the potential relationships between fiction-based entertainment media use and civic life remains mostly unexplored.’ There is now, however, a much more substantial body of research on the political effects of entertainment television in general, and of specific genres of entertainment television. And this in turn has led to

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a further development in post-Putnam scholarship. On the one hand, there have been those who have continued to adopt the same methodological framework, and who have sought to refine or challenge the correlations and causes that Putnam himself identified. On the other hand, there have been those who have adopted a different theoretical and methodological approach to studying the relationship of entertainment to political engagement. This latter perspective has concentrated more on the content of cultural texts (on what they ‘say’ about politics) and more on the way in which audiences interpret those texts. Both approaches represent attempts to answer the question of how entertainment culture contributes to political knowledge and engagement. Marc Hooghe (2002) is an example of the first of the two schools of thought. He found, for instance, that viewers of soap operas were more likely to feel a sense of ‘insecurity’ or to fall victim to the ‘mean-world syndrome’ than were viewers of crime series. Meanwhile Besley (2006) has shown how the ideological disposition of viewers of entertainment television was a key variable in determining their propensity for civic engagement. Both findings accord with research by Dhavan Shah (1998) which, in responding to an earlier version of Putnam’s argument that entertainment television displaces time that might otherwise be spent on civic activity, he suggests that what people watch is more important than how much they watch. Shah reveals a differential effect on trust and civic engagement between those who watch science fiction, social drama, or sitcoms. Much of the work in this, the first strand of post-Putnam research has focused upon entertainment’s impact on ‘political knowledge’. Markus Prior (2005), among others, has shown how those who prefer entertainment television know less about politics and hence are less likely to vote. By contrast, others (Baym, 2005; Hollander, 2005) have suggested that exposure to political comedy and programming, such as Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, can actually enhance political knowledge. These divergent results have prompted other, experimental research (Xenos and Becker, 2009) designed to track more precisely how political comedy communicates political knowledge. Together this research has helped to substantiate the suggestion that popular entertainment acts as a source of political knowledge, and as such impacts on the disposition to act politically. However, it represents only one perspective of the understanding of entertainment’s relationship to politics. Almost all the research above is limited in several respects. First, it focuses almost exclusively on entertainment television, and appears to be uninterested in other forms of popular culture. And secondly, within

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the field of television, it dwells most upon political satire, as if this is the only point at which ‘politics’ is directly addressed. Thirdly, the measurement of effect is concentrated on political knowledge, and political knowledge as factual details of politics traditionally conceived (ie, names of political leaders or awareness of political issues). Finally, the methods used to generate claims about these effects of popular culture are largely based on surveys or experimental methods. To point to these limits is not to question the validity or importance of the research. It has advanced significantly our understanding of the way in which popular culture and politics may be connected. But as with other research in this field, it does so in relation to a very particular understanding of politics (political knowledge of the liberal democratic system) and of popular culture (entertainment television). Representing politics in popular culture Other researchers in the post-Putnam era have taken a different path, in part because of a question about whether it is appropriate to see entertainment as a source of information and knowledge, and in part because of the fact that most forms of popular entertainment do not deal explicitly with politics as it is traditionally understood in liberal democracies as the public struggle for power by parties and other representative organisations. They have remained, nonetheless, interested in what popular culture has to ‘say’ about politics, and have as a result engaged in close reading of cultural texts, rather than in large-scale surveys. This approach is evident in the work of those who have subjected films such as Amerika and The Day After to scrutiny as works of political ideology (Feldman and Sigelman, 1985; Lenart and McGraw, 1989). It is perhaps most evident in the works of Douglas Kellner (1995) who reads films as the transcoded products of US political life. Liesbet van Zoonen (2005) has provided a framework to such studies through her demarcation of the narratives – conspiracy, bureaucracy, quest and soap – that she sees as applying to almost all representations of politics in fictional and factual media (see Chapter 5). In doing this, van Zoonen and others are also conceiving of popular entertainment as a source of political knowledge insofar as films and television programmes are constructing a ‘common sense’ description of political processes, but their focus is not exclusively upon the cognitive dimension. Studying media texts for what they ‘tell’ us does not exhaust their political importance. The attention paid to the narratives in cultural

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texts is also motivated, following Raymond Williams, by a need to see how audiences are made to feel about what they see and hear. This has two dimensions: the affinitive and the affective. These are discussed elsewhere (Chapter 3), so we mention them only briefly here. The affinitive refers to the way in which audiences identify themselves with the characters or situations being portrayed. The affinitive establishes a collective identity, a sense of who ‘we’ are, and who, by contrast, are ‘they’. This process assumes political significance to the extent that it evokes an idea of ‘the people’ or, in Benedict Anderson’s (1983) words, an ‘imagined community’. It also assumes political significance in raising the question of who represents the people, who can speak on their behalf. This question has emerged most starkly in recent years in discussion of the so-called celebrity politician (see Chapter 7). Popular culture has supplied an ever-increasing number of stars who, in associating themselves with different causes, have represented themselves as speaking for ‘the people’ (Marshall 1997). However, audiences and fans are not just invited to see themselves as part of a collectivity, but to invest emotionally in their shared identity. Jane Bennett (2001), for example, talks about how culture is important for ‘energising’ political commitments – this is akin to Raymond Williams’s idea of how culture contributes to ‘the structure of feeling’. Van Zoonen (2004) makes this explicit in the analogy she draws between the fan community and the political community, in which she presents the relationship of fan to star and citizen to politician as equivalents. Popular entertainment is seen as more than the carrier of knowledge, but as contributing to identities and feelings of attachment. This becomes evident in research into the fans of the political drama The West Wing (Holbert et al., 2003), who reveal how they use it to reflect upon liberal democratic politics, not just as an object of knowledge but as a subject of political passion. In short, this second approach to the study of entertainment’s relationship to political engagement is concerned not just with popular culture as a source of knowledge, but also of identity and emotion. One implication of considering these three dimensions is that popular culture is to be understood both as a source of pleasure and critical engagement, as well as a source of information. To overlook the pleasures of popular culture denies it its claim to entertain. To overlook the role of critical engagement is to ignore the importance of fandom. Both are key to appreciating how and when popular culture may connect to politics. We need to acknowledge all three aspects in exploring the uses

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of popular culture in politics. This argument is developed further in Chapter 3, and tested in later chapters. One further implication of this is that we need to go beyond texts that have liberal democratic politics as their explicit content. The not unreasonable temptation to consider only The West Wing and The Daily Show has to be resisted because of the possibility that apparently ‘unpolitical’ texts may be read or used politically. This is evident, for example, in Todd Graham and Auli Hajru’s (2011) research into audience discussion of reality television shows, or Nick Couldry’s (2010) reading of reality shows like Big Brother as disseminating a neoliberal ideology. There is a further, related implication. We need to break with the tendency to look only to television and cinema for these texts. Other forms of entertainment – music, video games – may be as, or more, important. Playing at politics It is one thing to issue various injunctions, as we have done above. It is another to say how we should act upon them. What is evident is that, in the research discussed so far, politics has emerged in various guises, and engagement with it has taken various forms. It has been associated with the formation of collective identities and collective action, and with the more routine forms of political engagement – most obviously, voting or the attitudes that inform voting. This is characteristic of the research by Putnam and by those who have responded to him. But politics has also emerged as ‘talk’ – what people say about their world. For some observers, particularly those schooled in traditional political science, ‘talk’ falls outside their field of study. Politics has to entail action, and talk is mere words. In their major study of political participation in the UK, Geraint Parry and his colleagues (1992) choose to exclude expressive forms of politics. They do so for two reasons: first, such behaviour is very difficult to capture by way of traditional survey techniques; and second, political participation, for them, has to entail involvement in the attempt to shape public policy. If engagement in politics is understood in these terms, then it sets a stern target for those who want to claim that popular culture plays any significant part. In addressing this challenge, a number of strategies can be adopted. What each has to avoid, as we indicated in Chapter 1, is the temptation to make everything ‘political’. Doing so certainly overcomes the problems of connecting the political and cultural realm, but it does so at the cost of emptying the relationship of any substance. This is one of the thoughts behind Nick Couldry and his colleagues’ (2010) insistence

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that researchers should not presume that even ‘public connection’, let alone political engagement, occurs in the consumption of media. As we explained in Chapter 1, politics can be understood as collective deliberation about public policy and the exercise of public power. To this extent, ‘talk’ can qualify as ‘political’. But as Hay (2007) notes, in offering this account of the political, there are degrees of politicisation. Talk may be more political or less political. In this spirit, Peter Dahlgren (2009) develops the notion of the ‘proto-political’, by which he means that politics is a learnt activity. And for Dahlgren, popular culture represents one possible source of political education. It is certainly true that individuals do not simply become sentient political beings on their 18th birthday. They acquire knowledge of politics inside and outside the formal channels of communication, and it is at least plausible that one such conduit is popular culture. But knowledge, like talk, does not translate automatically into changes in political thought and action. More than a decade ago, David Jackson (2002) reported on research in which he identified the role of entertainment television, movies and popular music in the process of the political socialising of young people. Such a task, he argued, had traditionally been performed by the family, school and religion, and more recently by news media (Jackson 2002: 9–15). Now it is performed by various types of popular culture, which may shape young people’s ‘sociopolitical beliefs’ and their ‘community imaginings’ Jackson (2002: 90). Dahlgren (2009: 141–142) also views popular culture as being a source of both ‘rational’ reflection on politics and an ‘affective response’ to it. He also sees it as providing connections to communities ‘beyond one’s private domain’, and to constitute these broader communities as ‘us’ or ‘them’, and hence mobilising political conflict. These possibilities are also entertained in the research reported here. Conclusion Both Dahlgren and Jackson take seriously the potential that popular culture represents for the route taken by young people into citizenship and political engagement. They see popular culture as playing a part in informing people’s dispositions to the world and to each other. In doing so, these writers form part of a tradition that we have been tracing throughout this chapter, one that seeks to find connections between the pleasures of popular culture and the political realm Over the last few pages, we have seen how there is now a substantial body of research that connects popular culture to politics, and that

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rejects the characterisation of the former as ‘mere entertainment’. We have seen how, in making the connection, considerable emphasis has been placed on the cognitive role of popular culture in representing the real world and informing audiences of it. We have noted, however, that in the second strand of post-Putnam studies there has been an attempt to extend the links to the affinitive and affective dimensions of politics. These links, we have suggested, need further investigation, particularly in respect of how works of popular culture themselves are used and understood – and that such works must incorporate more than television and film. We have also suggested that, in seeking to trace out the connections, we need to be sensitive to what is understood by the notion of the political and engagement with it. This is what has led us to the thought that political engagement may take the form of talk. What, at essence, we are proposing is that political engagement may emerge in the act of talking about popular culture. Whether it does is the question which our research addresses. But before we turn to this, we need to look more closely at exactly how culture enables (or not) engagement with politics. For this, we need to consider how media culture might inform the practices and forms of citizenship. We are not just interested in how popular culture might engage us with politics, but with how it might shape us as citizens. In a sense, this chapter has been about the journey from politics to culture; the next is about the return trip.

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Citizenship and popular culture

Where the previous chapter explored the traditions of thought that connected politics with popular culture, this one looks in detail at the latter’s relationship with the specifics of citizenship. For many writers it is not a happy relationship. As we have seen, Adorno and Horkheimer, and more recently Robert Putnam, are just a few examples of those who have cast a critical and (more often than not) pessimistic eye on popular culture’s potential to invigorate the public sphere. Together, these writers alert us to the harm that popular culture may do to democratic culture. They are critical of what they see as popular culture’s formulaic and repetitive content (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979). They suggest that enjoyment of popular culture takes time away from activities that strengthen community ties and democratic culture (Putnam 2000). They imply that popular culture ought to make citizens well informed and instil in them a belief in their political efficacy (e.g. Kenski and Stroud 2006). The only forms of popular culture which survive comparatively unscathed from criticism are factual genres – most obviously, print and television news. A growing body of research has helped to sustain the belief that these genres have an important role to play in democratic culture (e.g. Scheufele 2002; Prior 2005). Our own research is a response to our dissatisfaction with this pattern of research in which popular culture is condemned, and only news and current affairs condoned. For us, the problem lies in conception of politics and civic engagement that fails to encompass the contribution that popular culture can make to democracy and citizen engagement. We suggest that promising routes, leading away from traditional and narrow approaches, can be found in the work of writers such as Buckingham (1999, 2000), Dahlgren (2003, 2009) and Couldry et al. (2010). Their research allows us to conceptualise ‘politics’ beyond the narrow confines of government structures and processes, but it also

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helps us to describe citizenship as an identity, something a person experiences and acts out, not only in his or her relationship with government structures and processes, but also in everyday relationships and interactions with other members of society. We argue that by working with a wider conception of politics and of citizenship-as-identity, the democratising potential of a wide range of cultural forms can be considered in a more nuanced way. We suggest that citizenship has many dimensions and that popular culture has the potential to strengthen all of them. With this chapter we explain why we find unsatisfactory much of the existing empirical work on citizenship and popular culture and what we think are the advantages of approaching citizenship as a form of identity. In order to tentatively explore how one might apply such an approach to the analysis of popular culture, we draw on existing research in media and cultural studies and on the social science traditions upon which it draws. Defining citizenship Much of the literature on citizen engagement is dominated by the normative assumption that public engagement in politics is desirable because it is essential for the maintenance of democratic society. The underpinning concept of the ‘democratic society’ is that of an egalitarian, inclusive society, with equal opportunities for all to influence, indirectly and directly, ‘the quality of public life for oneself and others’ (Delli Carpini 2004: 396). This is of course an ideal type. There are many examples of societies that are commonly described as democratic, which have been criticised for social inequality. In the UK, for instance, racism still has a detrimental effect on health (Karlsen and Nazroo 2002) and education (Gillborn 2008). As much as there may be shortcomings with democratic societies in practice, the principles of equality and inclusiveness still remain important. The problem is not so much the vision of an ideal society, but rather its notion of an ideal member, a citizen who is defined by a narrow set of attitudinal and behavioural markers. It is this ideal type which has informed much of the existing empirical work on citizen engagement and more specifically work on citizen engagement and popular culture. Ideal type citizens are active participants. Not only do they make use of the opportunities secured by the principles of equality and inclusiveness, they also help to maintain them. In some instances this might require an individual or a group to challenge political authority. The ability and

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the willingness to do so have been described as being among the most distinctive aspects of membership of a liberal democracy (Kymlicka 2002: 289). Measures of civic participation in empirical work on citizen engagement include, for example, ‘working in a campaign, writing a letter to a public official, attending a community meeting’ (Brady et al. 1995: 271), having a general interest in politics, discussing politics with friends and attempting to convince others of one’s views (e.g. Bowler et al. 2003), but also participation in civic organisations and community (e.g. McFarland and Thomas 2006), the latter of which might involve ‘following community issues, working on community problems, collective engagement with government agencies’ (Kahne and Sporte 2008: 471), but also volunteering, donating money and attending meetings (e.g. Burr et al. 2002). While this range of activities seems wide, what these markers of citizen engagement have in common, with the possible exception of discussions among friends, is that they are predominantly located in a public or semi-public setting and involve a commitment of time or other resources for the sake of a larger public good. The ideal type citizens that we encounter in this literature actively seek not only to shape the relationship between members of society, but also the relationship between these members and the institutions by which they are governed. Popular culture and citizenship A snapshot of empirical research on citizenship and popular culture shows a focus on very similar markers of citizen engagement. We can find research that explores the impact of exposure to political information in news media and propensity to vote (Prior 2005) and research that looks at the effects of internet campaign exposure on political efficacy, political knowledge and campaign participation (Nisbet and Scheufele 2004). There are studies discussing the effect of newspaper public affairs content on ‘civics-book type knowledge of politics and current affairs’ on citizens’ political knowledge and interpersonal discussion about politics (Scheufele 2002: 54). Similarly, there is work that looks at the relationship between internet access and exposure with political efficacy, knowledge and participation, such as ‘trying to convince others to vote, giving money to candidates, wearing a button or showing a sign supporting a candidate (Kenski and Stroud 2006). Last but not least, there is work on the relationship between the use of news media and political knowledge, voting and general political participation, such as displaying a campaign button, attending meet-

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ings or speeches, donating money or working for a candidate or party (Eveland and Scheufele 2000). The first thing that strikes us about this snapshot of existing research on popular culture and citizen engagement is that it describes very similar markers of citizen engagement to those commonly used by more traditional approaches in political science. The second notable thing is that this research pays little attention to genres other than the news. Soap operas, sitcoms, video games and pop songs, the cultural preferences of our respondents, have attracted little academic interest. If ‘popular culture’ is culture that is appreciated by more than a niche audience and if it is culture designed to offer moments of entertainment and possibly diversion, then the research we just cited cannot claim to have looked at the relationship between popular culture and citizen engagement. This claim can be made much more successfully by an emerging field of writers, including Jones (2006), Barnhurst (1998) and Hermes and Stello (2000), who have explored the link between, for example, detective fiction and satirical talk shows and citizen engagement. In order to take this step, these writers had to explore concepts of politics and civic engagement that are wider than those which dominate much of the existing literature on citizenship and popular culture. The traditional and well-established approach within political science literature on civic engagement has been to focus on the relationship between citizens and government. In this literature, as Youniss et al. (2002: 125) point out, knowledge of the structure and function of government, and activities directed at influencing them (such as voting), are identified as behavioural and attitudinal indicators of ‘engagement’. We would agree that these forms of engagement remain important for politics. However, they are not sufficient enough to capture what politics means in everyday life. Bricoleur politics and cultural citizenship For writers like Jeffrey Jones (2005: 20) politics today is marked by a lack of commitment to traditional institutions (such as political parties, labour unions, and civic associations), yet composed of temporary alliances around issues and values linked to everyday life (such as morality, identity, and worldview). These alliances can be associated with new social movements (e.g., environmentalism or the ethical treatment of animals) or “identity politics” (e.g. race, sexuality, gender), but are generally ones that offer more individualistic forms of expression.

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In this portrait of what some would describe as ‘postmodern politics’, citizens ‘increasingly act as bricoleurs in their beliefs and ideological commitments, constructing their own a la carte politics through adhocing, mixing, and individualising social and political positions’ (ibid.). If we are to understand young people’s citizen engagement today, we need to take an approach which allows us to explore these new ways of ‘bricoleur politics’. As Kate Nash (2001: 84) argues, this view of politics makes it an inherent aspect of all social relations. This means that politics in the traditional sense, meaning government structures and activities, is of course still ‘politics’. However, our definition of ‘politics’ also takes into account the importance of identity politics and the negotiation of power in everyday life and within the liberal ‘private’ sphere. Feminist scholars have applied this approach to the analyses of media use in the home, demonstrating the ways in which everyday couple interaction is ‘a systematic re-creation and reinforcement of social pattern’ through which ‘women and men are creating and affirming themselves and each other as separate and unequal’ (Walker 1996: 820). Widening the concept of politics in this way does not mean that everything is political. As we argued in the previous chapters, the ‘political’ refers to struggles over power that have implications and impact that affect the conduct of public life. This wider concept of politics, which includes formal government processes and structures and the identity politics of everyday like, encapsulates many of the principles central to cultural citizenship, a model which has evolved from T. H. Marshall’s definition of citizenship and is said to include ‘the right to symbolic presence, dignifying representation, propagation of identity and maintenance of lifestyles’ (Pakulski 1997: 73), but also the willingness to encounter and consume cultural diversity (Stevenson 2001: 2). One might argue that this wider conception of the ‘political’ is not that radical a departure from political science approaches to citizenship. Yet, while the idea of identity politics has certainly found its way into the literature on citizenship, it has yet to firmly establish itself in empirical research on citizenship and popular culture. It seems to us that much of the existing work in this field has opted for a narrow, more traditional concept of politics, and when trying to establish the democratic potential of popular culture has tended to ask how news media might inform citizens’ knowledge of formal politics and political actors, or the propensity to vote. However, when we look at media and cultural studies more generally, we can see that this field of research is

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very comfortable with the idea that ‘politics’ includes identity politics and that politics can be found in both factual and fictional genres. Citizenship in media and cultural studies Within media and cultural studies, it is accepted that factual genres are important for democratic culture. There are, for example, studies that explore the ways in which politicians gain media access to create public awareness and support for their policies (Cottle 2003: 46–47). There is work which discusses how political institutions, alongside noninstitutional organisations are increasingly making use of PR personnel and strategies (Davis 2000) and are successfully helping to shape news content (Lewis et al. 2008). Research has highlighted how as a consequence of established journalistic routines, news media privilege the actions and opinions of cultural and political elites (Lewis 2006: 312). Alongside these studies, there is work which reveals how news media routinely represent or evoke citizens (Lewis et al. 2005). Yet media and cultural studies has for a long time also been comfortable with the idea that political fictions can play a significant role in democratic culture by helping citizens ‘to imagine how key processes work within polities’ (Randall 2011: 263). The British sitcom Yes, Prime Minister, for example, has been said to offer propositions about government in the 1980s: ‘that Britain is largely governed by a manipulative and devious bureaucracy; that political decisions are dictated by the self-seeking motives and incompetence of politicians; and that the electorate is hideously incompetent to participate in the democratic process’ (Adams 1993: 71). Political fictions have not only explored national political cultures, but also diplomatic relationships between countries, and even offered responses to events of national and international significance (Randall 2011). The US television drama The West Wing, for example, included a standalone response to the events of 11 September (Gans-Boriskin and Tisinger 2005). Media and cultural studies have also for some time been interested in media representation of those forms of power which are not elected, but which nevertheless govern many aspects of citizens’ everyday lives. We find, for example, analyses of the representation of lawyers (Chase 1986; Machura and Robson 2001), the medical profession (Lupton and Mclean 1998; Hall et al. 2003), teachers (Gerbner 1966; Mayerle and Rarick 1989) and the military (Leonard 2004; Andersen 2006). There is research into the ways in which popular culture represents collective interests. Studies have documented, for example, the representation of

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sexuality in comedy films and television drama (Arthus 2004). Others have reported on how race is represented in the news (Law 2002) and in sitcoms (Means Coleman 2000). And there is a literature on how disability is portrayed in television documentaries and drama (Harper 2005; Saito and Ishiyama 2005). Underpinning all these studies, whether they are based on textual analysis or audience research, is the argument that popular culture has the potential to reinforce, but also to challenge, the ways in which a collective identity might be understood in a particular society at a particular moment in time. An intimate connection has been drawn between power and representation. Feminist media research, for example, has revealed the limitations to, and the conditions of, women’s access to the public sphere (eg Robinson 1978; Tuchman 1978; Kaplan 1992). Similarly, research on diasporic groups has demonstrated how immigrants and their descendants seek out media texts that offer an alternative to the dominant culture in their country of residence in which they often find themselves economically, politically and socially marginalised (Miladi 2006). Within media and cultural studies there is an established tradition of working with a wider concept of politics. Moreover, there is a tradition which shows that the representations of such politics is not limited to factual genres, but can be found across all forms of popular culture. Our own research is very much informed by this work that we see as leading the way in analysing the relationship of politics to popular culture. However, we argue that there is an important gap: that between the observation of the representations and their role in citizen engagement. There is no established set of questions that audience research and textual analysis is expected to ask in order to explore the potential of popular culture as a resource for citizen engagement. In order to provide such questions, media and cultural studies need a working definition of citizen engagement which sits comfortably next to the wider concept of politics. Once such a working definition is established, it then becomes possible to identify the qualities a cultural text ought to have to strengthen such citizen engagement. While analyses of politics in popular culture tend to be quite clear on the point that representations of politics matter, they are less clear about the kinds of responses or processes they are hoping for in those who encounter these representations. Are they looking for a rational, reflective response or an emotional one? Are they, for example, hoping that these representations lead to a particular understanding of society? Empirical research into citizen engagement and news media offers one

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attempt at making a connection between specific characteristics of popular culture content and the behavioural and attitudinal markers of a citizen. It suggests that factual knowledge about formal politics is important for citizen engagement. Yet it seems to imply that other forms of political knowledge are of little or even no relevance, and it does not offer clear guidance on what forms of understanding or feelings the knowledge of formal politics is meant to strengthen. Public connectedness and citizen engagement To sketch out our definition of citizen engagement, we take inspiration from a group of writers that has attempted to make theories of citizenship work for the analysis of popular culture, including Dahlgren (2003, 2009), Buckingham (1999, 2000), Hermes and Stello (2000) and Couldry et al. (2010). We complement our definition of politics with an equally wide concept of citizen engagement and describe it as the formation and the expression of a relationship with both formal politics, and with the interests and issues affecting different social groups more broadly. This relationship can be very tentative in nature. In the work of Couldry and his colleagues (2010) we find the idea of ‘public connectedness’. It is the first essential step, in a sense a pre-condition, for those maybe much grander seeming civic activities like campaigning for a political issue, or donating money to a political party. Yet before citizens can decide that they want to campaign on a particular issue, they need to identify this issue and feel that something ought to be done about it. Couldry et al. (2010) describe public connectedness as ‘an orientation to any of those issues affecting how we live together that require common resolution’ (Couldry et al. 2010: 6). The idea of public connectedness helps to qualify the ideal type citizen who inhabits traditional approaches to citizenship, and who is imagined to explore carefully different points of view and make this process the basis for rational analysis and action. The ideal type citizen is aware of those issues that require collective action. Public connectedness points to a fuzzier set of relations and reactions. Being connected can entail a sensation, if nothing more, of belonging. We find this in the work of David Buckingham (1999, 2000) and Peter Dahlgren (2003, 2009), and also in that of Joke Hermes and Cindy Stello (2000: 219) who write: ‘Citizenship is first of all the ways in which we feel connected to the different communities we are part of, ranging from formally organised communities such as the nation state to virtual communities such as feminism’.

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The ideas of connectedness and citizenship-as-identity help us to describe what it means to be an ‘engaged citizen’. What they do not provide is an answer to the question of how popular culture might strengthen this identity. We need an approach that helps us ‘dissect’ the components of this form of public engagement. This is why we find Dahlgren’s (2003, 2009) terms – knowledge, values and affinity – useful. The idea that citizens need to have access to information about politics is central to the literature on citizen engagement and news media, but also more widely the political science literature on citizenship. As we have argued in this chapter and the previous one, we agree with those who suggest that knowledge about formal government processes and institutions is an important resource for citizens. Being a citizen means being aware of sources of power in society and having a sense of one’s relationship with these sources of power. An example of how popular culture might help citizens to form a sense of this relationship can be found in research on audiences of the Australian television drama EastWest 101. The drama was praised for not ‘sugar coating’ social issues and not offering an uncomplicated triumph of justice as narrative solution (McClean 2011). Audience research with members of minority groups, who have everyday experience of civic rights infringements, suggests that these members of Australian society brought their experiences of marginalisation to bear on their interpretation of the drama and specifically its portrayals of the police/public relationship (ibid.). However, as we have said, politics is not limited to sources of power that serve or represent the state. Being a citizen also means having a sense of one’s relationship with social groupings and their interests (Buckingham 1999, 2000). Media analyses have identified various techniques by which a media text creates a sense of group identity. We can see these operate at the level of the individual text. News and even weather forecasts, for example, signify the nation through ‘banal’ and everyday use of deictic language such as ‘we’, ‘our’ and ‘here’ to signify the nation and to place the audience within a national collectivity (Billig 1995: 105). Often individual characters in a narrative come to represent a wider social group and its interests. Analysis of narrative technique (Oatley 1994, 1999) and of camera angles (Flitterman-Lewis 1987) reveal how the viewer or reader is invited to establish a connection with a character’s experience and perspective. If citizenship entails having a sense of one’s place in the world, a sense of one’s relationship with sources of power and groups of interest, then it also means having a sense of the values that govern this relationship.

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The ideal type citizen that emerges in more traditional approaches to citizenship comes across as a very noble and selfless member of society. Citizens are described as people who undergo a process of intellectual and moral growth, who engage in self-reflective thinking about the self, their place in society and about what is of value (Leicester and Pearce 1997: 472). Openness and empathy towards a diversity of cultural experiences are identified as markers of citizenship (Osanloo 2009). The ideal type citizen in this literature is imagined as someone who subscribes to what are often called ‘universal values’, which include substantive values, such as ‘equality, liberty, justice, solidarity, and tolerance’, but also procedural values, such as ‘openness, reciprocity, discussion, and responsibility/accountability’ (Dahlgren 2009: 111). All these values fit with the concept of citizen engagement that we are working with. Yet they do not include values which may be harmful to democratic society, such as a belief in patriarchy. While we might not like what a supporter of patriarchy says, our concept of politics would certainly suggest that they engage in politics by proclaiming or otherwise acting out their beliefs. In order to capture the wider range of values that might be relevant for citizen engagement, we draw on Hermes and Stello (2000: 219) who suggest that ‘being a citizen’ means ‘having a sense of one’s place in society and the obligations and the rights that are due to oneself and others’. This approach, which does not clearly stipulate the nature of the values that inform citizen engagement, fits more neatly with our broad definition of ‘politics’ and citizen engagement. It captures democratic and potentially undemocratic values including, but not exclusive to what might be called universal values that bind humanity, such as tolerance, and societal level values that ‘depict a subculture, culture or society in terms of values’ (Schiffman et al. 2009: 170). Within media and cultural studies, we can find examples of how popular culture might be a resource for citizens to explore the values that govern society. Those writers who identify discriminatory representations of ethnic minorities (eg van Dijk 1991) or class (eg Lawler 2005), for example, have suggested that popular culture at times does not do enough to promote equality and social justice. Others have highlighted that in popular culture we can find examples of genres which legitimise values which are elsewhere marginalised. It has been argued, for example, that audience participation shows should be recognised for their contribution to a more equal society. These shows can sanction forms of talk that do not conform to culturally privileged notions of civility, and can give space to forms of living which elsewhere are

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branded as deviant and distasteful (Carpignano et al. 1990; Livingstone and Lunt 1994). A good example of how popular culture can operate like this can be found in reader responses to a storyline in the Green Lantern comic book (Palmer-Mehta and Hay 2005). An openly gay character, who becomes the victim of a homophobic attack, is avenged by the Green Lantern. As they shared ideas about the character and the plot, readers of the Green Lantern displayed ‘competing ideological positions’ (Palmer-Mehta and Hay 2005: 395). One reader’s story sparked a dialogue about homophobia and social values: I’m also a 25 year old gay man. I came out at 16 and was subjected to some of the brutality young queers face in America. I was harassed, though thankfully never physically attacked, through high school. During that time, I longed for positive queer characters to help me justify myself and my feelings. I found a handful, but also discovered that queer characters who survived to the end of the novel were exceedingly few … When I was a kid reading comics, I used to sometimes think “they saved the mother and kid from the falling building, but would they rescue me if they knew I was a fag?“ I now have an answer to that. My hope is that a closeted teenager will read that comic book and think “someone will fight for me. Someone who is respected and powerful will stand up for me and my rights” … My hope is that a homophobe will pick up that comic and think. (Letter 17, quoted in Palmer-Mehta and Hay 2005: 399)

The suggestion is that the Green Lantern storyline provoked a form of connectedness with a public issue, and as such established the potential (if no more) for engagement. The idea of political connectedness does not suggest that citizenship is limited only to moments when personal experiences chime with those of a wider social group. Connecting with issues of public concern also means connecting with issues that are of utmost importance to strangers who live in culturally and geographically distant contexts. Images of ‘distant suffering’ in documentaries about hunger in the developing world, or so-called telethons (Tester 2001), which combine comedy and documentary style segments with charity appeals, are an example of the ways in which popular culture creates opportunities to encounter a diversity of views and to connect on a moral level with the interests of culturally, geographically or economically distant others (Scott 2009). Opportunities to encounter and connect with the concerns of geographically distant communities of course does not mean that citizens automatically abandon their connections with the local contexts

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in which they are situated. Rather, they are open to both the global and the local, and have an understanding of how these spheres interconnect in their everyday lives (Thomlinson 1999: 198). When we imagine a citizen as someone who makes connections between the wider public sphere and his or her private life (Buckingham 1999, 2000), when we imagine a citizen as someone who makes normative claims about how the members of a society ought to relate to each other, then we also imagine this person as someone who might at times express their opinions in a passionate manner and who may not necessarily have arrived at these views as a result of careful and distanced deliberation. Someone who donates money as a result of having been moved by the images of poverty and hunger in a telethon might not necessarily have an in-depth knowledge of the socioeconomic and political processes that are the cause of such suffering. However, we would argue that the mediated encounter of suffering has strengthened important dimensions of citizenship: affinity and affect. Traditionally, liberal democratic theory has focused on the cognitive aspects of citizen engagement and stressed the importance of reason and rational debate. Emotions for a long time were considered to be detrimental to the formation of meaningful and valuable opinions and decision making (Pantti and Wahl-Jorgensen 2007: 4). Yet increasingly, this approach is being criticised for ignoring the affective dimensions of political engagement. Emotions have been identified as the motivators for political engagement (Marcus 2002) and emotional investment is important to keep citizen engagement going (van Zoonen 2004: 49). Encounters with the views of different social groups create opportunities to recognise shared interests, or to develop a sense of empathy which in turn may create feelings of affinity or belonging. Theories of media identification suggest that encounters with unfamiliar others, or encounters with a familiar social group, can be intense emotional experiences. They suggest that audiences at times develop a psychological attachment to a character and are no longer spectators at a certain distance from the text. They also describe forms of parasocial interaction, where a viewer maintains a minimal social distance between themselves and a character, and begins comparing themselves to a character and feeling close to them as a result (Cohen 2001). For our purposes we use a slightly cruder approach to this process of identification, of affinity and affect. We use this literature on media identification to support our argument that the media play a role in establishing emotional connections between individuals and social groups whose experiences and concerns may initially seem distant and

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unfamiliar to them. Our argument chimes with that of others who have highlighted how emotions can be an important motivator for citizen engagement and who have also sought to challenge the assumption that rational engagement with politics should be privileged over affective engagement. By focusing on knowledge, values, affinity and affect, we do not claim to have identified all possible dimensions of citizenship. We use this selection to highlight that the list of markers of citizenship is more diverse than what more traditional approaches to citizen engagement and popular culture have implied. We also use it as an analytical tool in our own research to help us explore how engagement with video games, television and popular music might provide for a sense of connectednesss and a disposition to engagement. We suggest that if we want to know whether popular culture can help connect citizens with issues of public affairs, we can start by asking three questions: Is popular culture a source of knowledge about political issues? Does popular culture help develop and explore a normative understanding about the values that govern society? Does popular culture invite citizens to develop a sense of affinity to, and affection for, other members of society? Conclusion In this chapter we have suggested that a useful way to explore the role of popular culture for citizen engagement is to approach citizen engagement as an expression of one’s place in the world. We argued that this sense of self is informed by knowledge of, and a relationship with, sources of power and social groups, by feelings of affinity and a sense of values. We do not claim that this lists exhausts all possible markers of citizen engagement or that it should be the only list by which we should judge the extent to which a young person is an engaged citizen. What identifying these various resources of citizen engagement allows us to do is to get a more nuanced understanding of the political function of the media. Our overview of existing work in media and cultural studies has shown that popular culture certainly seems to have the potential to provide the resources a young person might need for citizen engagement. What this overview has not shown, however, is whether the cultural likes of our research participants are equally suited as a resource for citizen engagement. We have so far looked primarily at the work of other researchers to get a first impression of whether popular culture might provide political knowledge in the widest sense of the word,

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whether it can be a resource for identity formation, the development of affinity and collective values. Our discussion in the last two chapters has been more than anything a theoretical exercise. We sketched out our working definitions of politics and citizen engagement, definitions which we developed at the start of our research project and then sought to apply to our empirical research. Our working definitions set us on what we think was the right path towards studying our respondents’ engagement with popular culture. However, before we could apply them to empirical research, we had to solve two more questions. Firstly, we needed to ask what kinds of characteristics we have to see in a cultural text in order to say with confidence that this text is a resource for citizen engagement. While in this chapter we did talk about knowledge, affinity and values, we were not all that specific when it came to explaining what these dimensions of citizenship might look like in a video game, a piece of popular music or on television. Secondly, we needed to ask how we can tell that popular culture is indeed a resource that our respondents use for citizen engagement. How can we be certain that there is a connection between the content of popular culture and what our respondents feel and do? It is one thing to ask a young person about his or her cultural likes and dislikes. It is quite another to take what this person says as evidence of citizen engagement. In the next two chapters we explore how we sought to solve these puzzles and made our concepts of politics and citizenship work for our own empirical research.

4

Researching young people, politics and popular culture

The previous chapters have set the context for our investigation into the relationship between popular culture and political engagement. This chapter explains our methodology. It begins with a critical review of the dominant, political communication methodologies whose ‘topdown’ approach, we argue, makes unwarranted assumptions about the habits and tastes of young people and about what does and does not constitute political engagement. We review a number of alternative, ‘bottom-up’ approaches that have emerged as a result of dissatisfaction with large-scale survey data and find the approach adopted by David Buckingham (2000) to be particularly suitable for our aims, notwithstanding a number of important modifications. While our distinction between ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches may be rather crude, it is useful for clarifying our attempt to take account of the personal and subjective nature of political engagement and media and cultural use. Our review of different approaches to investigating the role played by popular culture in political engagement provides the justification for our own three-phase research process. We argue that to research young people’s political use of popular culture effectively, we need first to establish what – for them – popular culture involves. Secondly, we also need to be sensitive to the political ideas and values contained within the texts that young people use and enjoy. Finally, it is in listening to young people’s talk about popular culture that the answers to our question as to how popular culture plays into politics are most likely to be found. Two traditions of research In their discussion of the precedents for investigating the relationship between media use and public engagement, Couldry et al. (2010: 43)

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identify two distinct approaches. The first approach, pursued in political communication research, relies almost exclusively on large-scale survey data to make generalisations about the relationship between different types of media use and political awareness and forms of civic engagement. It is this ‘top-down’ approach which is used to provide evidence to support the claims of authors such as Besley (2006), Hooghe (2002) and Shah (1998), discussed in previous chapters, and which dominates research in this area. Such studies use different proxy measures of media use and political engagement, such as ‘frequency of circulating a petition for a cause or candidate’ and ‘exposure to newspaper coverage of international affairs’, to examine the direction and strength of apparent causal relationships between them (Shah 1998; Hooghe 2002; Besley 2006; Zhang and Chia 2006; Cao 2008). For example, using data from the 1995 DDB Needham Life Style study, Shah (1998) finds a positive association between viewing social dramas and several different measures of civic engagement, and a negative association between civic engagement and viewing of science fiction. He uses this as evidence to support his conclusion that ‘television viewing plays a conditional role in the production of social capital that is dependent on the use of particular genres’ (Shah 1998: 469). This emphasis on survey methods is at least partially the result of an adherence to what we previously defined as a rather narrow definition of political participation in which indicators such as ‘likelihood of voting’, ‘interest in politics’, ‘church attendance’ and ‘perceived influence in the neighbourhood’ can be regarded as reliable indicators of civic engagement. Given our broader understanding of the political, discussed in Chapter 2, we argue that such indicators fail to capture the complex, contested and multi-dimensional nature of the political, and that as a result, they ‘inhibit the understanding of how people participate and also why they do not’ (O’Toole et al. 2003: 45–46). Using one’s vote, or writing to the local MP, for example, might be considered political by political theorists and might offer an easily quantifiable indicator of ‘political engagement’, but it is by no means the only way in which citizens can act politically. A similar argument can also be made in relation to media use. Quantifying ‘exposure to newspaper coverage of international affairs’ might allow us to gain some indication of the nature of citizens’ habits of media consumption, but it fails to capture the complexities and negotiations involved in citizens’ use of media as part of their daily lives. The claim that survey data overlooks key dimensions both of the nature of the political and of the complex social contexts in which

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media use takes place is well illustrated by the results of an ethnographic study of media literacy education by Dunsmore and Lagos (2008). In this they compare their experiences of working with a group of inner-city high school students who produced various television programmes dealing with political issues, with the results of a survey of the political participation and media use of the same students. Whereas the survey indicated that the students had low levels of news media use and correspondingly low levels of political awareness, Dunsmore and Lagos conclude from their study that the students had a ‘rich and sophisticated’ awareness of political issues. This was articulated through their highly developed awareness of, and identification with, non-news television formats. In summary, we contend that ‘top-down’ surveybased approaches to examining the political uses of popular culture are too rigid to allow us to ‘get at’ the multiple and complex ways in which popular culture plays into politics. The second broad methodological approach to investigating the relationship between media use and engagement that Couldry and his colleagues (2010) identify is one that works from the bottom up and concentrates on the complexities of ‘how people think about their public connection’ and ‘the details of people’s reflexivity’ (Couldry and Langer 2005: 189). Unlike survey methods which seek to produce an objective, quantifiable account of citizens’ political actions, the focus in these ‘bottom-up’ approaches is precisely upon the subjective experience of citizens. Rather than imposing a rigid, a priori definition of the ‘political’ through the use of a limited number of proxy indicators, such approaches privilege the accounts given by citizens themselves; it is what they understand to be political in the context of their lives. While there is, as yet, no consensus on the most appropriate methodology for listening to citizens’ own accounts of what it feels like to be a citizen (or not) and establishing if and how culture texts play a role in this, there are a number of studies from which to draw. In one of the first studies to adopt this approach, Kevin Barnhurst (1998) approaches the study of the relationship between media use and political participation by listening closely to young people’s accounts of their life histories. He argues that young citizens live out a version of politics in their daily lives, and that this emerges ‘in the stories they tell about themselves and their interactions with the political media’ (1998: 202). By listening to the way in which young people recall and recount their life experiences and the role of the media in these experiences, Barnhurst is able to investigate how young people use different media in their political thinking and decision making, ‘to define their

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political lives, or their lives as political’ (1998: 204). In particular, Barnhurst discusses how young people draw upon the media to define their identities as adults or their sense of how power operates. He concludes (1998: 216) that the young people he spoke to use commercials and magazine ads, fictional TV shows and films, sports or gaming to give form to their dreams, personal and collective, and then they act as bricoleurs, gathering the detritus of fad and fashion to create their own styles and express themselves as political beings.

Barnhurst’s approach is explicitly developed as a result of dissatisfaction with survey methods, which, he argues, ‘measure the phenomenon from the outside, from a comfortable distance. Their subjects – the citizens ... exist at a far remove, like artefacts under a glass’ (1998: 203). An even more elaborate means of listening closely to citizens’ own accounts of their political participation is deployed by Couldry et al. (2010) in Media Consumption and Public Engagement. They combine the results of personal diaries over a sustained period of time with interviews with the diarists themselves. This qualitative material is also used as the basis for a survey of the general population. The aim of their mixed methods approach is to pay attention both to the ways in which political engagement is embedded within the organisation and practices of everyday life and to take seriously respondents’ status as ‘thinking individuals’ (see Gamson 1992: xii). This approach emerged out of both a critique of survey-based methods and of their dissatisfaction with the limitations of conventional panel data. Markham and Couldry criticise political science’s ‘overwhelming emphasis’ on survey methods, arguing that it ‘has blocked a consideration of more subtle citizen reflexivity’ (2007: 677) and that it has prevented empirical research from reflecting ‘the experiential dimension of citizenship’ or ‘the hidden cultural hierarchies that shape the experience’ (2007: 676). Couldry and Langer also describe the conventional panel data they used in an earlier study as ‘insufficient for exploring the complex issues around public connection’ (2005: 254) because it is not sufficiently sensitive to the details of people’s reflexivity. Couldry and his colleagues (2010: 44) argue that the sheer complexity of civic culture, with its multi-dimensional processes involving the multi-­directional flow of causal influences between each dimension, requires us to give detailed attention to the reflections of individual citizens. The value of the Couldry et al.’s approach is evident in the questions it allows them to both ask and answer. Rather than speculating about the strength and direction of the causal nature of the relationship between

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media use and political engagement or the significance of different variables, they are able to explore the complexities and varied forms of public connections that different citizens exhibit, and the role of the media in enabling or undermining these public connections. The final major study discussed under this approach and the one which we choose to follow most closely is Buckingham’s (2000) study of the relationship between television news and youth citizenship. Buckingham (2000: 1) argues that if we seek to provide evidence of how news media relates to youth citizenship, we must trace ‘the dynamic complexities of young people’s interpretations of news, and their judgments about the ways in which key social and political issues are represented’. First, Buckingham examines the ways in which young people interpret and respond to what they watch. Central to his approach is a focus on young people’s talk, which he regards, not as direct evidence of what people really know or believe, ‘but as a form of social action which serves particular social purposes’ (1999: 175). Talk is understood as a form of social action, and talk about media and culture as revealing of how these play into that action (see also Bhavnani 1991: 75–76). For example, Buckingham argues that in talking about media, individuals lay claim to and construct particular social identities and that ‘these claims to identity are essentially claims to social power’ (2000: 72). Similarly, when young people make use of what he describes as a ‘media literate’ discourse by demonstrating their awareness of various dimensions of the production process of media texts, they are simultaneously claiming autonomy from the media as a source of power. Thus, analysing the discourses young people deploy in their conversations about popular culture allows us to investigate the roles media and culture play in their (political) lives. As Buckingham (2000: 63) says of the talk of the young people in his study: In talking about television, these young people were not only providing interpretations of, and judgements about, what they had seen. They were simultaneously defining themselves as particular kinds of people, or claiming particular social identities; they were also negotiating their relationships with others – and not only those who happened to be present.

In other words, young people’s use of popular culture is revealed in their talk about it, which in turn is revealing of wider, social relations. Where Buckingham’s approach differs significantly from that of Barnhurst and from Couldry and his colleagues, is that he combines a concern for the ways in which young people talk about media texts with a concern for the possibilities contained within popular culture

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texts. Buckingham includes a second dimension into his approach which involves an examination of how media texts enable audiences to construct and define their relationship with the public sphere. His focus is not on issues of representation or bias, but rather on how media texts address, and thereby attempt to position, their viewers (2000: 36). Buckingham uses the word ‘position’ intentionally to draw attention to his concern for the implicit assumptions within media texts regarding their viewers/listeners/players – ‘about what young people are and about what young people should be’ (ibid.). Buckingham finds these assumptions manifest in various dimensions of media texts. They are manifest in the choice of topics, the role of the presenter and the use of narrative. It is Buckingham’s approach that we find valuable because it allows us to combine a concern for the way in which popular culture texts appear to position young people with a concern for the way in which young people make use of these texts. Put another way, it allows us to meet Couldry et al.’s call for investigations into the relationship between popular culture and civic engagement to be sensitive both to the practices of young people and to the possibilities contained within popular culture texts. However, if we are to provide an analysis of media texts that is meaningful to young people themselves and which does not simply privilege those texts which we consider interesting, then it is also necessary to include a third stage in the research process, one in which we establish what their preferences are. Our approach to investigating the role played by popular culture in political engagement thus comprises three discrete but mutually dependent phases. Phase one involved a survey of the popularity of particular programmes, games and music artists among the population of pupils from which we selected our focus groups. In the second phase of our research we investigated what various examples of popular culture appear to be ‘saying’; what assumptions appear to be made about power, identity and good/bad behaviour? The final phase of our research involved the use of focus groups and interviews to investigate how, in fact, young people think and talk about popular culture and what this might tell us about their understanding and engagement with politics. Three forms of popular culture Before discussing the details of each phase of our research it is necessary to first introduce the rationale for the three different forms of popular

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culture we chose to focus on: television, video games and popular music. As is evident from previous chapters, much of the existing literature concerning the relationship between popular culture and civic engagement has taken its lead from Putnam and is focused solely on television (Hollander 2005; Temple 2006; Cao 2008). While some quantitative survey studies have sought to examine the differences between different forms of television content (Shah 1998; Hooghe 2002; Besley 2006), few discussions, and even fewer empirical studies, have taken this further by examining the particular ways in which other forms of popular culture relate to civic engagement. Those studies which have addressed this are based solely on quantitative survey data (Zhang and Chia 2006). This dominance of television has been, in many ways, understandable since television plays such a central role in the lives of most UK citizens. Ninety-seven per cent of all adults in the UK say they watch television regularly (Ofcom 2009: 7) and the average adult in the UK spends approximately three hours and 45 minutes per day watching television (Ofcom 2010). Despite a decline in television viewing among young people in the UK in recent years, 93% of them continue to watch TV regularly (albeit on a variety of platforms) (Ofcom 2009: 10). However, other forms of popular culture are also prominent in the lives, particularly of young people, in the UK. Seventy one per cent of young people (aged 16 to 25) in the UK regularly listen to music and 47% regularly play computer games (Ofcom 2009: 7). Indeed, claims for the political nature of popular music form part of what might almost be described as a conventional wisdom (Lynskey 2011). Yet, to date, there is relatively little empirical evidence on which to ground these claims. Similarly, while the potential of digital games as stimuli for learning and development of social roles has been recognised (see McFarlane et al. 2002: 13; Gee 2003), there is no large scale study available which asks whether video games have the potential to stimulate political learning. We contend that research which examines multiple forms of popular culture is of increasing importance in a media environment in which traditional news coverage generally (and political coverage in particular) are becoming increasingly marginalised in a deregulated media system (Hamilton 2004; Baker 2007; Stanyer 2007; Negrine 2008). Indeed, young people are less likely than adults generally to say they regularly watch television (93% compared to 97%), and are more likely to sometimes or often use other media while watching television (86% compared to 69%) (Ofcom 2009: 8). In summary, if we are to understand more fully how popular culture

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relates to the lives of young people, then television should not be the only form of popular culture under investigation. But in adding video games and popular music, we are not interested just to cover more cultural ground. We are also seeking to learn something through the comparison of them. We are curious as to how the cultural forms might differ in the way in which they facilitate forms of engagement. It should be noted that though the internet features in our research, particularly in discussions of online gaming, for example, we excluded social networking and other internet forms of popular culture because our concern was with the specific case of mass media culture. Phase 1: Surveying cultural tastes and political views The principal purpose of our survey of young people was to identify a range of genres and specific texts within each form of popular culture which respondents frequently encountered in their everyday lives, and which we could use to guide our textual analysis. Our decision to analyse those media texts that young citizens identified as their most and least favourite, rather than media texts which appear overtly political or which previous academic studies had identified as political, was driven by our ‘bottom-up’ approach to research. We saw little point in analysing the politics of cultural texts in which our respondents were uninterested. This approach also allowed us to gain a measure of the relative popularity of different genres, and thereby to inform the topics we covered in our focus group discussions. A secondary aim of these questionnaires was to gather background data on respondents’ attitudes towards politicians, their perceived knowledge of politics as well as the levels of their interest in local, national and international politics. This information also proved useful for stimulating discussion in the interviews and focus groups. In a pilot survey of 60 pupils in years 12 and 13 at two schools in Norfolk we asked respondents to list up to three of their most favourite and three of their least favourite television programmes, musicians and video games. While this approach was designed to prevent us from imposing our own definition of popular culture on the project, thereby avoiding a limiting of results from the outset, it also meant that we were faced with the problem of trying to detect trends of cultural taste in a population characterised by high levels of diversity. For example, 24.4% said they liked and 28.0% said they disliked hip hop, and 34.9% said they liked soap operas, but 37.5% said they disliked soap operas. Identifying media texts that were popular among all of our respondents

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using such a ‘bottom-up’ approach proved close to impossible because no particular media text was mentioned as popular by more than 10% of respondents. Before distributing our questionnaire more widely among the other participating schools, we therefore amended our questions to ask young people about their consumption of those media texts/artists with the highest number of responses in our initial survey (either in the category of likes or dislikes). While this approach was less empowering to respondents than the approach in our pilot study, it did allow us to identify specific media texts for our textual analysis which we could assume many of our respondents frequently encountered in their everyday lives, whether as fans, ‘neutral observers’, or ardent opponents. This second survey was completed by 123 young people in years 12 and 13, from five different schools across Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, and included the population of pupils from which our focus group and interview participants came. These five schools included one independent school and four comprehensive schools. They were also divided between those with an urban catchment and those with a rural one – 55% of our questionnaire respondents were female and 45% were male. Our survey revealed, rather unsurprisingly, that our respondents expressed eclectic tastes in popular culture. Although we might consider them ‘omnivores’ rather than ‘univores’ (Chan and Goldthorpe 2007), it was possible to identify some particular favorites. On television, they favoured programmes such as Friends, X Factor and Hollyoaks, each being encountered, at least ‘sometimes’, by 80% of all respondents. Their taste in video games included Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, Halo and The Sims, though no more than 30% of respondents played any of these games ‘often’. Their musical tastes were the most diverse, ranging from the heavy metal of Metallica to the hip hop of Kanye West with no one genre or artist/group dominating. The media texts/artists within each medium chosen for textual analysis were Halo, Kanye West, Metallica and Hollyoaks. These particular media texts/artists were chosen both because they were frequently encountered by our respondents and because they generated the strongest passions, whether in favour or against, in our pilot focus group. Although we would claim these texts might be considered as ‘representative’ of the tastes of our respondents, we do not believe that a great deal hangs on these particular choices because our aim is not to make claims that are necessary typical of popular culture texts in general, but merely to identify the points of political engagement offered

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by cultural items whose formal purpose is to entertain and whose nomination derives simply from questions about cultural tastes. Our survey also revealed the extent to which our respondents’ consumption of popular culture is social, in the sense that it was enjoyed in company and was a frequent topic of conversation. Relatively few young people in our survey claimed to only play video games by themselves (26%) or to never play video games (14%). Indeed, playing video games was regularly a social activity, played with friends in the same room (65%) or online (37%), with family members (44%) or with other people online (31%). The shared experience of consumption was also reflected in young people’s use of music and television – 96% of respondents claimed to talk to friends about music and 60% admitted to talking to their family about it; 88% claimed to watch television with family members and 79% with their friends. Our questions regarding young people’s political dispositions revealed that respondents do not see national and local politicians as having any direct relevance to their lives. Only 6% of respondents thought that national politicians had ‘a lot’ of influence on their lives and none thought this was the case for local politicians. In contrast, the media (40%) and teachers (26%) were judged to be far more influential. These findings were corroborated during focus groups and interviews in which we met very few young people who expressed an interest in formal politics or confidence in their knowledge of political issues. There was no discernible pattern in the nature of the political issues the young people in our survey found to be most important. This first phase of our research was important in providing a context to our later work by enabling us to establish some sense of the cultural tastes and political dispositions of the young people we would later speak to. Before speaking, and listening, to them, however, it was necessary to consider how politics featured in the content of some of the texts that were most meaningful to them. Phase 2: Analysing cultural texts We argued earlier that the shift from a ‘top-down’ research approach to a ‘bottom-up’ approach represents a move from a communication paradigm based on correlations between media consumption and social attitudes to one based on subjective interpretations and shared meanings. Within the latter approach, the political significance of popular culture, we argue, is to be found both within the texts themselves and in their audience’s use and understanding of them (Corner and Pels

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2003). Our aim in the second phase of our research, therefore, was to identify the potential for political engagement offered by different cultural texts. Just as the news content of television news bulletins and newspapers can be ‘read’ politically (Herman and Chomsky 1988), so we contend that entertainment television, video games and popular music can also be ‘read’ to reveal the ways in which they might position young people in relation to political engagement. In order to achieve this, we required a means of identifying the political in media texts – and one which fits with our relatively broad understanding of what is political. Buckingham (1999: 175) provided one possible approach in the form of a series of questions which he invites us to ask of texts. 1. How does the media text position audiences in relation to the sources of power in society? 2. How does the media text position audiences in relation to particular social groupings? 3. How does the media text enable audiences to conceive of the relations between the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’? 4. How does the media text invite audiences to make sense of the local, national and international arena, and to make connections with their own experiences? However, Buckingham’s operationalisation of these questions did not prove particularly useful as a model for our own research because of his relatively narrow concern only for television news programmes catering for children. Given our much broader focus on entertainment television, popular music and video games, we developed instead an approach organised around the idea of ‘points of engagement’. These allowed us to see how and when forms of popular culture were seen to invite political engagement. We arrived at these points of engagement, as we explain in Chapter 5, by way of standard media analysis techniques. In our dissection of television texts we focused on aspects such as mode of address, narrative, character and genre (see Fiske 1987 and Geraghty 1991). Video games were analysed with a focus on the scenarios, narratives and characters, as well as the levels of social interaction offered by a particular game (see Sze-Fai-Shiu 2006 and McMahan 2003: 74). The analysis of popular music was not confined to lyrical content, but took account of modes of address, genre and various aspects of sound, image and performance (following DeNora 2000; Frith 1996; Tagg and Clarida 2003; Middleton 2003).

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In summary, the focus in this second phase of research (the results of which are discussed in Chapter 5), was on how politics appeared to feature in cultural texts. Our approach to identifying the political within these texts was formed initially through the questions Buckingham invites us to ask, but eventually through an even broader focus on ‘points of engagement’. But while we regard attempts to read the ways in which cultural texts appear to position their users politically as vitally important, we also contend that it is largely through an examination of how this positioning is adopted or contested by young people that a more comprehensive account of the relationship between politics and popular culture is revealed. Phase 3: Interviews and focus groups The purpose of the third and final part of our study was to investigate how popular culture texts, of the type we analysed, are understood and used by young people, and whether and how these understandings and uses link to politics and citizenship. Key to this was creating an opportunity, first, for young people to talk about what popular culture means to them and how they experience its pleasures. Secondly, we wanted to create a forum in which to listen to whether and how this talk was used to establish knowledge of the world, affinity with others and feelings about either. Central to this approach is that the talk we analyse is relatively free, or more precisely, not over-directed (so that every conversation about popular culture becomes a conversation about politics). It was for this reason that we opted for focus groups in which our participants were responding, as much as was possible, to each other, rather than to us as researchers. In order to generate sufficient talk about how young people expressed different aspects of their attitude to different examples of popular culture, in the first instance, we conducted 13 semi-­ structured focus groups in our five schools. The 98 students we spoke to in our focus groups were drawn from years 12 and 13 and were a mix of gender (57% female, 43% male) and backgrounds. We used our initial focus groups to explore the optimum size of our focus groups, as recommended by Tang and Davis (1995), as well as to explore the clarity and number of questions that would produce the most open and productive research setting for respondents. We had initially planned to use various video/sound examples to stimulate discussion, and did so in early focus groups. We found, however, that such prompts were unnecessary – the respondents were familiar with the

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texts, and playing clips only served to break up the flow of conversation. We aimed for focus groups of no larger than five participants each, but as our research had to be slotted into the scheduled teaching hours of schools, this was not always possible and some groups had up to seven participants. At the start of each focus group we stressed the openness of the project’s themes and emphasised that we were not interested in making normative judgements about media use or political engagement. Throughout the focus groups we allowed participants ample opportunity to talk relatively freely about particular popular culture texts and different media forms. We saw our role as facilitators of talk among participants. This reflexive and flexible approach enabled us to avoid imposing a too narrow definition of what is political and what elements of a media text are of particular relevance to audiences. While we sought to give participants as much space as possible to talk on their own terms about media use, we were also interested in participants’ talk about specific forms of popular culture and there were many occasions in which we wanted to invite participants to continue to talk about a particular issue or idea. We therefore felt that a certain degree of prompting was necessary (e.g. in relation to celebrity politicians, see Chapter 7), which the focus group setting allowed us to do and which would not have been possible had we adopted other, less obtrusive methodological approaches, such as ethnographic studies (Gillespie 1995), or media diaries (Couldry et al. 2010). The ability to intervene in discussions also helped us to use later focus groups to further explore in more detail some of the themes that had emerged from the earlier focus groups. The focus groups also provided an opportunity for us to hear young people speak with each other and helped us to garner contextual details and familiarise us with idioms employed by young people (O’Toole et al. 2003: 56). The second strand of this research took the form of individual interviews in which we were able to generate further talk and to explore the dominant themes generated in the focus groups and follow up specific responses in more detail (O’Toole et al. 2003: 58). For this we interviewed 26 randomly selected pupils from the same five schools, all of whom had been focus group participants. These interviews also introduced autobiographical narratives that allowed us to probe further the ways in which politics and citizenship featured in responses to and uses of different popular cultures. All focus groups and interviews were tape-recorded, transcribed and discussions anonymised. When quoting young people directly in this

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book the contribution of each participant is signalled by letter rather than name to preserve anonymity and different focus groups and interviews are signalled by number only. Contributions to the discussions made by the interviewers are highlighted in a bold ‘I’. The transcription conventions stressed readability at the expense of detailed nuances of pronunciation, pauses and timing (Wetherell et al. 1987). All participants were made aware that their responses would be recorded and used in publications and were given consent forms before the start of each focus group or interview. Having generated many hours of talk through our focus groups and interviews we required a means of identifying when young people’s conversation about popular culture became ‘political’ (in the sense that we understand that term). Graham and Hajru (2011: 22) define such ‘political talk’ as ‘a public-spirited way of talking whereby citizens make connections from their individual and personal experiences, issues and so forth to society’. They justify this by arguing that: It is through ongoing participation in everyday talk whereby citizens become aware and informed, try to understand others, test old and new ideas and express, develop and transform their preferences and opinions. That is, it is through such talk whereby citizens achieve mutual understanding about the self and each other. It is these informal conversations over time that prepares citizens and the political system at large for political action. Consequently, everyday political talk and those spaces that provoke and foster such talk become crucial to maintaining an active and effective citizenry specifically and the public sphere in general (Graham and Hajru 2011: 20).

We agree that in order for talk to be considered political it must refer to a public world in which the lives of others are implicated and where the speaker is reflecting upon how that world operates and/or should operate. We regard young people’s discussions of popular culture as becoming political only when it constituted a comment or reflection on a wider society, such as young people’s relationship to sources of power or to particular identities. We originally planned to use Buckingham’s questions as a starting point for our analyses of the participants’ talk. 1. How do audiences express a sense of their relationship with sources of power in society? 2. How do audiences position their own identities in relation to particular social groupings? 3. How do audiences express a sense of the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’ when discussing media texts?

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4. How do audiences make sense of the local, national and international arena, and do they make connections with their own experiences? Once again, however, these questions ultimately proved to be too limiting. The conversations we recorded were less focused and more unpredictable to be amenable to such a predetermined framework. We ended by sharing Dahlgren’s (2006: 279) view that: it is via meandering and unpredictable talk that the political can be generated, that the links between the personal and the political can be established. The looseness, open-endedness of everyday talk, its creativity, potential for empathy and affective elements are indispensable for the vitality of democratic politics.

As we mention in Chapter 2, we found Dahlgren’s notion of the ‘proto-political’ to be helpful. ‘Proto-political talk’, he argues, affords ‘transitory glimpses, preliminary meanings, multiple frameworks, explanations and narrative structures’ that may coalesce as political comprehension (2009: 33). Thus, in our efforts to test whether there is evidence of political, or ‘proto-political’, talk in the conversations of the young people we spoke and listened to, we found a more open-ended approach to be more amenable than that provided by Buckingham. Conclusion We began this chapter by discussing whether the methodological approaches used to investigate empirically the role played by popular culture in political engagement have kept up with the recently expanded theoretical frameworks for understanding the key elements. Taking our lead from authors such as Buckingham (2000), Barnhurst (1998) and Couldry and his colleagues (2010) we aligned ourselves with the recent trend of ‘bottom-up’ approaches which eschew attempts to identify correlations and apparent causes between popular culture and political engagement in favour of approaches which attempt to take account of the subjective experience of citizens. Specifically, we set out a three-phase approach that allowed us to not only examine the presence of politics within popular culture texts, but through focus groups and interviews to investigate the connections that young people made between the pleasures of popular culture and political engagement. Furthermore, our approach was designed to be sensitive to the tastes and media use of young people themselves, without unnecessarily imposing our own judgements about what is political and what popular culture texts and media forms are important.

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There are also, of course, real limitations to our approach in terms of scope and detail; limitations that large-scale surveys or ethnographic work, for example, might ameliorate. However, we would argue that our approach does yield valuable data about youth consumption of popular culture and of links to the wider world of politics, and that it compares favourably with the methods adopted in other equivalent qualitative studies. Our central contention is that it is only through qualitative research such as this that we can begin to understand how popular culture is rendered meaningful and how this might connect to politics – in other words, how we might address the question of how popular culture has the effects suggested by large-scale surveys. We begin our empirically driven investigation into this issue in the next chapter by considering how media texts appear to offer various potentials for political engagement.

Points of engagement: politics within popular culture

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Points of engagement: reading the politics within popular culture

Most of the rest of this book is about what young people say in their conversations about popular culture. It is their talk that is key to our research into the links between politics and the pleasures of entertainment television, music and video games. But before we turn to these conversations, we need to devote some attention to what it is they are talking about: the shows, the songs, the games. Whilst what our respondents themselves think about these things is ultimately what matters, their responses need to be considered within the context of the specific features of these different cultural forms. This was, as we have explained, phase 2 of our research. As Stuart Hall (1980) argued many years ago, the meaning that culture acquires is constrained both by the resources that audiences bring to the business of interpretation and by the character of the text itself. So it is that we see young people as working within the realms of possibility allowed both by the constraints of resource and of text. The first refers to the skills and knowledge that they bring to their understanding of popular culture, and, as we shall see, our respondents like to see themselves as ‘media savvy’, even if this claim itself is not always borne out by what they say and how they respond. The second constraint is that constituted by the text. While films, television programmes, video games and music are open to multiple interpretations, we share Hall’s view that there tend to be ‘preferred readings’ which any given text promotes. Our particular interest in the texts is with the extent to which they might seem to invite – either explicitly or implicitly – a political response. By this we mean: does engagement with the programme or song or game seem to entail some kind of reflection upon, or reaction to, the way the wider world is ordered in terms of the public exercise of power? And more specifically, do the different types of cultural pleas-

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ure work differently in inviting political reflections and responses? In what follows we explore these questions through the idea of ‘points of engagement’. We use this term to designate the kinds of political connections a soap opera or a song or any other such texts appears to offer to audiences and fans. It is important to stress that we are talking about possibilities within the texts, of the potential they offer for political engagement. Whether these possibilities are taken up depends on how our research subjects actually respond. In identifying the political possibilities within cultural texts, we are not just interested in how they ‘represent’ the wider – the ‘real’ – world. We are also curious about how those texts might invite audiences to develop affinities with others, and that these may in turn lead to affective responses and evaluative judgements that might motivate political engagement. Our ‘points of engagement’ refer to the cognitive, the evaluative, the affinitive and the affective. We illustrate these possibilities through analysis of works of popular culture that our first-time voters themselves referred to as their favourites, but first, and developing on from the discussion of our method in the previous chapter, it is important to say more about what is involved in identifying points of engagement in any cultural text. More than knowledge As we have already noted, much of the previous research into the relationship of popular culture to politics has tended to focus on the former as a source of political knowledge, rather narrowly defined. James Curran (2011: 83) makes explicit the rationale for this: ‘While American war movies may provide a cognitive orientation towards different positions in relation to the American military state, this is no substitute for journalism-based knowledge of what the American state is actually doing.’ Our research is a challenge to this claim on two fronts. The first is to question the assumption as to what kind of knowledge is and is not appropriate to an informed political position (and from where that knowledge might derive). The second is to question the empirical base on which Curran’s argument rests. Do we actually know what ‘American war movies’ provide? It may be true that someone who consumes entertainment culture will have little knowledge of the names of leading politicians or the details of recent political events. But is it true that they would be ignorant of politics? They might well have knowledge of how political processes operate, of the motivation of politicians and of the issues that

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occupy them. They might too have knowledge of past political events. To which it might be objected that their knowledge is flawed in the sense that it derives from works of fiction and of the imagination. To a committed post-structuralist, there is an instant comeback: both ‘news’ and ‘entertainment’ are media constructs, neither of which can be measured against some standard of independent truth. But even if that position is rejected, there is still the question of whether ‘truth’ is the exclusive province of a particular form of media content. Our research is an attempt to, at the very least, keep this question open: to see whether forms of entertainment may be read as offering ‘knowledge’, and to see if our respondents use it in this way – as a means of learning about how the world works. So in looking at cultural texts, we want to consider how they might contribute to traditional notions of political knowledge. But we also want to move beyond the assumption that they contribute to only this dimension of citizenship. We want also to ask, as have those writers we discuss in Chapters 2 and 3, how forms of popular culture may forge communities of interest and mobilise evaluations and emotional reactions to the way the world appears to be ordered. Thus, we envisage several possible points of engagement: the cognitive, the evaluative, the affinitive and the affective. And in looking for them, we argue that we need also to be sensitive to the different ways in which forms of culture – entertainment television, video games and music – operate, and hence how this will affect the points of engagement. To summarise: we are arguing that, in tracing the links between popular culture and politics, we need to pay close attention to the cultural texts themselves, reading them for the possibilities they offer. These possibilities we characterise as ‘points of engagement’, by which we mean opportunities that texts might seem to create for political reflection and action. We propose that, in principle, there are three such points: 1) how popular culture represents the formally acknowledged political world (what some might describe as the ‘real world’) to its audiences; 2) how those audiences are positioned in relation to that world and the processes that determine what happens within it; and 3) how audiences feel emotionally and ethically about the way the world operates. As we show below these three dimensions capture a substantial part, if by no means all, of the literature on the relationship of politics to popular culture. In the final part of the chapter, we analyse the texts our own respondents identified as important to them, to see whether these texts were indeed taken to provide an insight into the ‘real world’.

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Points of engagement (1): Representing the ‘real world’ of politics In this section, we return to the idea of popular culture as a source of knowledge; in this case, knowledge about the wider world (and particularly the wider world of politics). Our question is how and when is popular culture seen to represent that political world as something to be known? There are two ways in which popular culture is said to represent the political realm. The first involves fictional accounts of the conventional forms of politics – stories about presidents, protests and political causes. In other words, dramas, songs or games that evoke, as their core subject matter, the traditional sites of political activity. This is to be contrasted with a second way of representing politics in which rather than holding up a ‘mirror’ to politics, popular culture evokes it by means of allegory. In this form, there may be no direct references to politics (in the conventional sense), but the text itself will be decoded or interpreted as being about politics. Examples of the first are most vividly represented in protest songs, of which there is a long history (Lynskey 2011). Equally, many video games deal directly with the exercise of political power, most obviously in the rise and fall of empires. But it is probably traditional visual media that have the largest – and most studied – range of examples of fictional representations of politics. These include such television shows as The West Wing, The Thick of It, Yes, Prime Minister, Bill Brand, Citizen Smith, The Wire, Party Animals, State of Play and Borgen; or films such as The American President, Primary Colors, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Dr Strangelove, Enemy of the State, The Candidate and so on. These texts are typically analysed in terms of what they say about the nature of politics. Liesbet van Zoonen (2005: 105ff) has performed an especially useful task in identifying the four basic narrative forms into which all such political dramas or comedies fall (and, she suggests, documentaries and news too). These narratives are the quest, the conspiracy, the bureaucracy and the soap. Each portrays politics as a different kind of activity being driven by different processes or interests. So, for example, the quest presents politics as a series of hurdles or challenges which the hero confronts, while the conspiracy presents the hero as the victim of secretive and malign forces that frustrate at every turn. It is important to note, however, that these examples of fiction in which politics is the main subject matter are rare; they are the exception, not the rule. The rule is that politics is notable more by its absence, and politics is most tellingly absent from those programmes that trade upon the very idea that they reflect some notion of lived reality, the

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soap opera. Coronation Street, Emmerdale, EastEnders and Hollyoaks offer an account of the routines of ordinary life, but one in which politics is almost wholly missing. As Stephen Coleman (2007: 35) notes, references to politics in soaps are extraordinarily rare. The soap genre, he argues, never allows the characters to ‘interact as citizens’. Politics – in its conventional form – tends to appear only in those works of fiction that have the political realm as their focus. But this is not to see the other programmes as apolitical. Politics can be present by dint of associations or allegories. Politics can be part of the subtext rather than the text. This perception depends on the work of interpreters and analysts who ‘read’ the text through events in the political realm, even where the text itself does not address them explicitly. Douglas Kellner’s (1995) account of the Rambo series and of other Hollywood blockbusters are examples of this approach. Kellner finds within popular films a range of political issues, whose tensions and significance are explored within the narrative and the action. Movies such as First Blood, says Kellner, represent (literally, re-present) a response to neo-conservatism, to free market economics and to imperialism and feminism. The key term, for Kellner, is ‘transcoding’. The political subtext is not so much ‘translated’ into fictional form, but rather taken from one world and re-coded into another one, so that the self-contained dramas are read as the re-enactment of these larger political issues. Such exercises in transcoding are not, however, to be seen as interesting forms of art, in the way that, say, a Shakespeare play is transposed to a different time or place (see, for example, Ralph Fiennes’s re-setting of Coriolanus). Or at least, they are not just this. What they are also is an exercise in rhetoric – an attempt to get audiences to see the world through particular, ideologically inflected glasses. For Kellner, films – and indeed other forms of popular culture – have the capacity to give form to the anxieties and ambitions that fuel politics. To this extent, they are to be understood as a body of knowledge about the world, as a representation of how things ‘really are’. We may dispute the accuracy of that portrait, but that is not the point. Popular culture, by this account, should be seen as another way of documenting the world, and, in fact, an important way. Our suggestion is, then, that this first aspect of the politics of popular culture is focused on the representation of the ‘real’. Although they differ in their emphases and their perspectives, analysts of popular culture’s political content share the thought that fictional representations of politics construct a notional ‘real world’. This, in turn,

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creates a potential for conversational engagement and participation through questions about how ‘real’ or ‘realistic’ that portrayal is for the audience. Points of engagement (2): creating affinities A second dimension that emerges in analysis of the politics encoded within popular culture is its contribution, not just to the perception of the ‘real’, but to the relationship the audience has to that reality. There are two (linked) elements to this. The first involves the disposition to political action that is implicated in the representation of politics. The second involves the political identities that are constituted through engagement with popular culture. The first – the disposition to political action – can be seen as an extension of the narrative-based approach to the analysis of popular culture. In identifying the contrasting narratives, Liesbet van Zoonen (2005: 109ff) points to how they differ in the way audiences are ‘positioned’ in relation to political action. To illustrate: where politics is portrayed as a quest, the audience is invited to think that political participation is rewarded with success, or at least the possibility of success. In contrast, if politics is portrayed as the product of conspiracy, then the audience is encouraged to see political action as doomed to fail. Kellner does something similar when he decodes films. He looks to how the audience’s sympathies are organised to support a particular ideological position, by how they are encouraged to identify with a particular character (eg John Rambo) and his predicament. Putnam (2000: 243), too, uses a similar positioning approach when he considers how television police dramas work. Drawing on research by Allan McBride (1998), he argues that the contemporary cop show tends to promote an individualist fatalism through their emphasis on the maverick police officer. It is this rogue loner, rather than the rule-bound team, that solves the crime. Van Zoonen, Kellner and Putnam all suggest that fictional representations of a particular real world invite different dispositions to action. These in turn can be understood as dispositions to political action. This is obvious where the ostensible subject is politics, but it is there too in police dramas or action movies. They all invite the audience to think in terms of the possibilities of action that will change the balance of power in the world. As such, they constitute a second point of engagement that popular culture creates for its audiences and fans. This point of engagement does not just establish the possibility of political action; it also has the potential to facilitate communities of

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interest and identity. Again, this is evident in Kellner’s (1995) claim that audiences in the US identify themselves with America in their response to the action in the Rambo films. A similar suggestion is to be found in Paul Cantor’s (2001) reading of The Simpsons. Both Cantor and Kellner analyse popular culture as constituting common identities (‘imagined communities’, as Benedict Anderson (1983) memorably characterised them) that, in turn, animate political orientations. Rather than positioning audiences directly in relation to traditional centres of political power, popular culture is understood in terms of how it places people in relation to wider forms of social power and to each other, and in terms of the collective identities that are thereby constituted. As we have seen in Chapter 4, Buckingham (1999) adopts this approach in his exploration of young people’s use of news, and it is also present in work on ethnic identity (eg Gilroy 1987/2002; Rose 1994; Gray 1995, 2005) and on women (McRobbie 1990, 2008; Hollows 2000; Tasker and Negra 2007). These constructions of identity are not confined to visual cultural forms. Simon Frith (1996: 275), for example, says of music that: ‘Communal values can only be grasped as musical aesthetics in action.’ And similar arguments can be found in analysis of the role of music in the formation of collective political identities (Eyerman and Jamison 1998; Mattern 1998; Steinberg 2004). In summary, the second possible point of engagement lies not so much in the perceived ‘realism’ of the fictional portrayal, but rather in the explanation it invites of political reality and in the communities of interest it establishes in relation to that reality. In respect to the latter, it opens up discussion of who ‘we’ are that might act to change the world for whatever reason. Again, it is worth reiterating that we do not assume that all films, games, TV programmes or songs have these capacities to account for the way the world is, or identify who ‘we’ are. Or at least, they are not all equally effective at doing so. What we are saying is that these possibilities exist within popular culture, and as such they form an important backdrop to our attempt to see whether, how and in what ways young people use popular culture to make sense of, and engage with, politics. Points of engagement (3): evaluating the political A third possible point of engagement is to be found in the pleasures of popular culture. Here the focus is on the means that popular culture has to excite emotional and ethical attachment to causes and issues. Compared to the previous two points of engagement, this one fea-

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tures less prominently in the literature. The emotional realm has been neglected in the social sciences, where the preference has been for accounts of human action that focus more on rational calculation. The emotional or affective side of human behavior has been seen as ‘irrational’, and as such defying social scientific analysis. This is changing, particularly in the field of social movement theory (Goodwin et al. 2001) and some areas of post-structuralist political theory (Connolly 2011). Scholars in cultural studies are less prone to overlooking the affective, but it is still relatively rare for this to be connected to the political realm. One exception is Lawrence Grossberg (1992), whom we mentioned in Chapter 2. He sees popular culture’s affective power as linking directly to politics, or more particularly, to political ideologies. For Grossberg, music can mobilise an ideological disposition. Nick Couldry (2010) makes a similar point in his discussion of the connection between programmes like Big Brother and neoliberalism. He argues that television of this kind sustains certain forms of authority and ­‘particular types of individualism’ (Couldry 2010: 79–80). What Couldry and Grossberg suggest is that the emotional experiences generated by popular culture are connected, via moral judgement, to politics. And it is exactly this relationship that we are interested in exploring in the cultural tastes and practices of our respondents. Do we find emotional responses that are organised around a sense of injustice, and in particular a sense of injustice that relates to the public realm of political power? Do our young people respond to popular culture by, in Coleman’s words (2007: 23), ‘making the political personal’? This possibility is evident in Roger Silverstone’s (2006) concentration on the relationship between media and morality. It is also present in how the political theorist Jane Bennett (2001) sees forms of culture as important to ‘energising’ our moral commitments. For Bennett, it is not enough for people to identify actions or states of affair as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. They have to be moved to act to promote the good and challenge the bad. In a related way, Simon Frith (1996) argues that the discrimination made in favouring one form of culture over another entails more than an expression of ‘taste’. It represents a moment of ethical agreement (Frith 1996: 58). To summarise: there is always a danger in analysing the political significance (or otherwise) of popular culture that its pleasures, its links with fun and entertainment, are overlooked. This is, in itself, important. But what is even more significant is that these pleasures also encompass a connection between morality and passion, and that this extends into the political realm. It is this possibility that our third point of

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engagement is focused upon. We do not assume that such connections are made. As with the other two points of engagement, we are operating at the level of speculation. Our task in this book is to ground these speculations in the talk and practices of our young respondents. The first stage in this process is to look in detail at whether the examples of popular culture that our respondents favour do indeed make available these so-called points of engagement. Finding points of engagement It is one thing to identify possible points of engagement, drawing on what other writers have claimed to find in the texts they have studied or the arguments that they have developed. It is quite another to see specific instances of them in any given programme, game or song. What follows is our attempt to do just this. Drawing on examples taken from the brief survey we conducted with our young subjects (see Chapter 4) we have picked texts from each form of popular culture. For the entertainment television, we have chosen a soap opera, Hollyoaks; for the video game, we have used Halo 2; and for music, we have used Metallica’s ‘One’ and Kanye West’s ‘Stronger’. What we want to explore is how points of engagement manifest themselves in these examples. Members of the research team were assigned to analyse carefully the individual examples, looking in particular for instances of the points of engagement. Their findings were then scrutinised and checked by their colleagues. What follows, however, does not pretend to be definitive readings of the texts, but is, rather, indicative of how points of engagement to the political emerge within different cultural forms. The soap opera

Hollyoaks is an early evening soap opera, shown on week nights on Channel 4 in the UK. It is set among a small, suburban community, populated by – for the most part – glamorous young men and women, and their families. We examined episodes of Hollyoaks over the period 4–15 August 2008. As with most soap operas (O’Donnell 1999; Matelski 1999; Spence 2005), the plot is driven by a sequence of domestic and interpersonal crises, in which power relations within the family and among friends often appear to determine the decisions made by the characters and their fate. But while the focus is on the private and the personal, it is evident that Hollyoaks includes a number of state institutions – most notably,

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the police, schools and colleges and the health service, and several other agencies, such as the legal profession and insurance companies. These institutions do not just appear as part of the background; they feature as sources of power. Another source of formally sanctioned power is that of the various (public and private sector) employers who also populate the drama. One source of power that is notable by its absence, however, is that associated with conventional politics. There are no elected council or parliamentary representatives, no government ministers, no political activists of any other kind. In short, the ‘real’ in Hollyoaks is narrowly circumscribed, but does include public and private sites of political power. To this extent, the ‘real world’ of public life is present, even if the political process that regulates and directs it is not. Hollyoaks appears to offer, therefore, a point of engagement into the reality of politics, but one that is limited. When looking at the other sites of power, it is worth noting variations in the extent and legitimacy of the power that they exercise. Doctors, for example, act as legitimate and authoritative sources of power. Their word is taken on trust and acted upon. In one of the plots, ‘Emo kid’ Newt is diagnosed as schizophrenic by a doctor who then, with explicit reference to the Mental Health Act, detains him. Even though Newt shows signs of distress at the news of his detainment, the medical decision is never questioned. While, within the world conjured by Hollyoaks, medical authority is sacrosanct, police authority occupies a more ambiguous status. In some plot lines, the police appear as a legitimate organisation who detect a crime and send those responsible to prison, but on other occasions the police’s behaviour is thrown into question. In a storyline about a pub owner who has faked his own death, we hear family members endorse the police’s legitimacy and express faith in their capacity to detect fraud and send the perpetrator to prison. By contrast, in another plot line involving Sasha, a heroin addict, and her brother Calvin, a policeman, the latter steals drugs from a dealer and gives them to his sister. In offering these competing perspectives on the police, the programme might be seen to be inviting a point of engagement in which competing evaluations of the exercise of power are on offer. Insofar as the audience’s sympathies are tied up with the fate of the characters, they also become emotionally involved in the storyline and in the outcomes that are generated. Take, as an example, the story of Calvin and Sasha, and in particular the way that it is portrayed. As the camera focuses on Calvin, in the aftermath of his brush with the drug dealer,

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we hear (in voice-over) his fiancée praising his character and trustworthiness. Once again these contrasting portrayals prompt the audience to question the policeman’s motives and actions. The images create a point of engagement around the ethically right course of action and around who ‘we’ are – in this context. Because, too, of the audience’s familiarity with the characters, they are unlikely to judge them in a dispassionate way. They are expected to share in Calvin’s sense of duty as a brother as well as in his responsibilities as the upholder of law and order. The plot begs the question about what it is right for ‘people like us’ to do. This plot line also positions ‘us’ in relation to the way the world ‘works’. Drug abuse is represented within the context of individual experience and personal relationships, and associated with problems at home, rather than in society more generally. By the same token, the solutions are personal rather than state-based or social. So, once again, the point of engagement is qualified in this respect at least. While the institutions of politics and their representatives may be absent, Hollyoaks does not embody a hermetically sealed, privatised world. There are a variety of regional accents – northern English, Welsh and Scottish – and there is a story of a marriage of convenience that references immigration and the interconnectedness of countries and their communities. The ‘we’ here becomes more complex and nuanced. Analysed like this, we would contend, Hollyoaks appears to offer several points of engagement, albeit limited in distinct respects, that map on to politics in the ways we described earlier. The plots and episodes that map the world of Hollyoaks refer to a wider one. There are connections drawn between communities, and moral dilemmas raised that require evaluation. And in the process, the emotional affections of the audiences are pulled in different directions. But while we can point to these potential points of political engagement, it is, of course, quite another matter as to whether audiences see it like this or respond in any particular way. The video game

Halo 2 is a first-person ‘shooter’ game, set in the twenty-sixth century. Our analysis concentrates on the plots in which the player becomes immersed. They provided both meaning to the game and motivation for playing, particularly for a first-person shooter game in which the game play is rigidly linear, formulaic and based on action-based, mission logic (Klevjer 2001).

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The core plot involves the conflict between humans and a rival species called the ‘Covenant’. The player typically adopts the role of Master Chief (a cybernetically enhanced soldier), but can opt to be the ‘Arbiter’ of the humans’ opponents. Where Hollyoaks, as the genre requires, seeks to mimic or construct a recognised everyday reality, games such as Halo 2 are not so constrained. They do, nonetheless, need to structure a world in which the player understands the forces at work and the options available to him or her. When played as a soldier, the missions are guided by a strict hierarchy of army authority that is seldom challenged. By contrast, when the player adopts the position of a disgraced military leader in the enemy ‘covenant’, he/she assumes the role of an avatar and, in doing so, avoids the death penalty. In this aspect of the plot, the covenant’s theocracy is revealed as unprincipled and false, inviting the gamer to challenge political and religious institutions. Or at least, this is one possible interpretation. Stahl (2006: 119) offers an alternative one in which the game is seen to reduce the distance between the citizen and the soldier by encouraging gamers to view ‘enemies’ unproblematically and to normalise and sanitise war, ‘creating an uncritical patriotism involving the inevitability of violence’. Either way, the game seems to offer points of engagement to a ‘real’ world of global conflicts. Games like Halo2 also create, according to Steve Jones (2008: 17), their own unique ‘paratextual universe extending outward from the game(s)’. The paratextual universes are not the product of the game only but also of the books, films, blogs, advertisements and even usercreated landscapes that surround the games (Jones 2008). Together, these elements can be seen to transcode current anxieties and concerns. Indeed, the hierarchy and internal politics within the different alien races that make up the Covenant are analogous to the class structure and aspects of the politics of modern Britain. And as in Hollyoaks, there are recognised sources of external power that may be treated as legitimate or may be challenged, depending on which character the player adopts. All of this suggests that, like Hollyoaks, Halo2 also establishes a point (or points) of engagement with a putative real world of power politics. The world is represented in the actors and institutions, and the plot that connects them. But does it also allow for points of engagement to communities within such conflicts? In the gameplay itself the only sources of power that matter are the enemy’s, because only they can ‘kill’ you, and your fellow marines who help you to ‘kill’ your foes. The only relations you have with either of these sources of power involve killing. Or to view this in another way,

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the only way for gamers to act out the meanings relating to sources of power (by carrying out their orders or undermining the corrupt theocracy of the covenant) is also to kill their enemies. Insofar as this might seem to establish connections to others, it is related to the repetitive inner narrative of ‘kill, explore, kill some more’ (Aarseth 2003: 4). This may generate some sense of ‘connectedness’ with the military and with the ‘enemy’ at times of war, but it would seem that the creation of affinities is not an obvious feature of the game. This may be a peculiar feature of video games, or of this particular genre of game. The experience of playing a video game is different from that of watching a soap opera. The player is positioned as part of a community of others, one that – in the game – is part of a political order. The gamer’s emotional sympathies are similarly engaged, providing the appeal of the game (Jansz 2005). The production of meaning in video games requires the active participation and often the ‘immersion’ of the gamer (McMahan 2003). As Aarseth (2003: 2) argues, ‘a game is a process rather than an object – there can be no game without players playing it’. Although narrative and/or plot may be significant, the sensations of engagement and involvement can be more important to giving meaning to the game (Klevjer 2001). For a variety of reasons, gaming does not lend itself so easily to the kind of analysis that we applied to watching Hollyoaks. Nonetheless, we have shown how games may provide points of engagement with politics. From the power structure that gamers inhabit, and how they choose to relate themselves to it, to the communities (within and outside the game) with whom they identify, to their immersion in it and their emotional investment: these all set up possible points of engagement with the wider world and with forms of political response. The music

Our respondents showed the widest variations in taste when identifying their favourite music. No one act or genre dominate, but heavy metal – of which we take Metallica to be a high profile example – had the effect of generating the strongest passions, whether in favour or against. Hip hop similarly divided our sample. Hence our choice of Kanye West’s ‘Stronger’ (2007), his first UK number one, the video for which is reported to have been viewed 37 million times on YouTube; and Metallica’s ‘One’, their first video, viewed some 10 million times on YouTube. While it may seem relatively straightforward to map television plots

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and gameplays to a putative real world, it is less so with music. As Alex Ross (2007: xiii) writes, ‘Musical meaning is vague, mutable, and, in the end deeply personal’. Nonetheless, Robert Walser (1993: 33) still maintains that musical genres do evince ‘certain preferred meanings’ which ‘tend to be supported by those involved with a genre’, and these in turn constitute ‘sites where seemingly stable discourses temporarily organise the exchange of meanings.’ What is perhaps true is that lyrics, while typically regarded as the repository of a song’s meaning, have to be treated with caution. They do not function as dialogue in a script, or even as poems; their meaning resides as much in their performance (Frith 1996; Tagg and Clarida, 2003). Whatever weight is placed on lyrics, it is the case that music’s meaning will also derive from the associated images, as well as from the accompanying melodies and the rhythms. But these points simply compound what we have already claimed in our discussion of other cultural texts: they are not designed to produce definitive readings. Our aim is merely to indicate how within such texts it is possible to identify points of political engagement. So, for example, the video of Metallica’s ‘One’ focuses on the plight of an individual who, it seems, is the semi-conscious victim of war. Early images are of surgeons, peering down upon the comatose figure, whom we are encouraged to think has been wounded by a landmine. The impression is of a world at war, a thought that is reinforced by the chorus of ‘Keep the home fires burning’ that is heard at the end. This impression of war is further suggested by an exchange from the Hollywood movie Johnny Got His Gun (1971) that is edited into the video. Henry Fonda is asked by a young boy: ‘What is democracy?’ To which Fonda replies: ‘Got something to do with young men killing each other, I believe’. And the boy asks: ‘When it comes to my turn, will you want me to go?’. To which Fonda answers: ‘For democracy, any man would give his only begotten son’. It is hard not to read this clip as an ironic comment on established liberal wisdom and US patriotism, but equally it might be read without irony. Either way, the song invites audiences to place themselves in relation to a wider world than that occupied by the individual – the ‘one’ – of the song’s title. At the same time, the evaluation of this world is couched in an individualist perspective. ‘We’, the viewer-listener, look up at the surgeons, and the song’s lyrics and vocals invite us to share the predicament of the lone and lonely victim. To this extent, like Hollyoaks, a sense of individualistic fatalism pervades: ‘Now the world is gone I’m just one/oh God, help me hold my breath as I wish for death’. However, it could be argued that, in engaging us in this scenario, we are also invited to rebel at its strictures.

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The raucous, defiant vocals might be heard as challenging the fatalism of the images. Kanye West’s ‘Stronger’, in contrast, can be read as a song about sex and the self-contained relation between two lovers: ‘Baby, you’re makin’ it/harder, better, faster, stronger’. And power relations can be seen as confined to the bedroom: ‘You can be my black Kate Moss tonight/play secretary, I’m the boss tonight’. It is entirely plausible that the song be read in these terms, but it may be worth pointing to a contrasting interpretation, in which the strength alluded to is that of African-Americans. Were this the case, then ‘Stronger’ might be imagined as a revisiting of Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect’, a song that has been understood as a personal plea for recognition, and as a collective plea on behalf of all women or all African-Americans. Whatever interpretation is placed on the song, the differences are to be understood as dependent upon the community of ‘others’ with which the listener identifies. In the case of ‘One’, as its title implies, the image is one of isolation, of someone trapped and alone, but as we have also argued the song conjures up a spirit of collective unity and defiance. And while the lyrics of ‘Stronger’ seem to locate the listener in the privacy of the bedroom, its visual representation takes us to a science fiction world in which humans are made ‘stronger’ technologically to live in a neon-lit futuristic Japan. There is little tenderness or sensuality here; it is the brusque sound of automatons. It is as much the world of the lone individual as that captured by ‘One’. Although both songs can be made to extend outwards into worlds beyond those of individuals or couples, the precise identity of these worlds is often hazy. It is not clear if the places they conjure up – whether Kanye West’s sci-fi Asia, or Metallica’s war-torn Europe – are read as ‘real’ by audiences, just as it is not clear as to which communities they invite membership. But, as we have said, this is not our point. Our concern is with the possibilities that the songs may create for listeners, and the points of political engagement they might, or might not, establish. Indeed, it is to this that we turn in the next chapters, when we listen to the way young people themselves talk about popular culture. Before doing so, we should re-trace our steps. Conclusion We began this chapter with the question of how popular culture might allow for engagement with politics. We argued that there were several possible forms of this engagement: the cognitive, the affinitive, the

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evaluative and the affective. And we suggested that we could conceptualise these in terms of the points of engagement they provided. Furthermore, we speculated that the possibilities for such engagement might be expected to vary with the type of popular culture – whether it was entertainment television, music or video games. We explored this possibility first through the literature that sought to establish or point to such connections, and then through examination of particular examples of the three cultural forms. Our purpose in doing this, it should be remembered, was to create a framework within which to examine what young people actually said about their cultural tastes and experiences. In other words, we did not want to assume that because we had identified points of engagement that these necessarily operated in the world of our respondents. We did, however, want to see what possibilities might exist. Ultimately, as we explained in Chapter 4, our concern was not with the texts themselves, but with the talk they prompt. We treat talk as a possible form of political engagement; and our question is whether the talk that popular culture produces was talk that could be viewed as just such engagement. The writer Angela Carter once declared that ‘A narrative is an argument in fictional terms’ (BBC Radio 4, Tribute, 16 February 2012). Our question is whether the narratives of popular culture are seen as political arguments. It may well be that works of fiction, and works of entertainment more generally, are not just telling stories or creating sensations. They may be, in their very different ways, making arguments, and many of these connect directly to the wider world of politics, of how we live and who determines how we live. We have already suggested in this and other chapters that this is the case. But our analysis of popular cultural texts was not designed to produce direct evidence of engagement with politics, but rather to see how such texts might fit within our points of engagement framework. This we have done, albeit with the qualifications attendant upon the differences in cultural form that they represent. We showed that there were points when a soap like Hollyoaks or a game like Halo 2 could be seen to offer knowledge of a real world, or how a song like ‘One’ could seem to invite a sense of community and emotional commitment to loyalties beyond those of family. But revealing these possibilities is not the same as claiming that they are taken up. And it is this step that lies at the heart of our project. The next chapter, and the ones that follow, are dedicated to this.

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Real power

Do young people use popular culture to acquire knowledge of, and pass judgement on, the wider world of politics? This is the question that this chapter tries to answer. It does so by reporting on the focus group discussions and interviews that we had with our young participants. We begin, not by focusing on politics specifically, but by looking at how works of fiction and the imagination are deemed to connect to the ‘real world’. In listening to the talk generated by our interviews and focus groups we found one of the most common ways in which young people spoke about either media texts, or representations within popular culture, was as either ‘real’ or as ‘unreal’ or ‘fake’. As one of our participants claimed, ‘most things on TV are set up. They are not real’ (Focus group 8). Such judgements over reality were particularly evident in the way in which the young people we spoke to talked about the judges in reality television programmes, such as The X Factor and The Apprentice, but also in their views on soap operas, in their talk about playing video games and in the authenticity attributed to music and musicians. In this chapter we argue that these judgements about reality can often be read politically because they can reveal young people’s understanding of where power lies in society and how they attempt to position themselves in relation to sources of power. As said in previous chapters, we regard knowledge of sources of power as an important part of civic engagement, and important to the sense one has of one’s place in the world. These claims about power extend from media power – the capacity of media to influence us – to other forms of power – such as the power to hire and fire, for instance. We also find, bound up within these claims about reality and power, a number of additional political claims – for example, about the nature of mass society and judgements about where responsibility for the protection of children should lie. Throughout, our comparative approach helps to reveal the various

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ways in which different forms of popular culture are used differently by young people to express their relationship to sources of power (Scott et al. 2011). What is real? For a number of reasons, young people’s apparent capacity to distinguish between the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’ in relation to popular culture has long been an object of research (see Hawkins 1977; Brown et al. 1979; Hodge and Tripp 1986). This issue has been of most interest to those concerned with the apparently harmful effects of television on young people and for those wishing to mitigate such effects by promoting media literacy. Our concern is rather different. We are interested in whether young people believe what they see, and whether this belief represents an understanding of how the world works. We are not, however, interested in validating their judgements about reality, but rather in seeing how they use popular culture to arrive at them. We begin by asking what young people might mean when they describe something as ‘real’ or otherwise. Many earlier studies adopted the assumption that there is a preferred, ‘real-world’ reality that should be accepted over the ‘unreal’ version of events shown on television (see Morison et al. 1981). In her review of such studies, Dorr (1983: 202) argues that when we speak of something on television as ‘real’ we may mean that it is exactly as it is without the medium. In other words, the medium simply ‘mirrors’ the world ‘as it actually is’. Another sense of the ‘real’ applies to thought that what is seen on the screen has an existence outside the studio or the film set. So actors in a television drama, for example, would be considered to be ‘real’ people, but the characters that they play would not be considered ‘real’ because they do not exist outside of the mediated performance. Equally, the lyrics of a song might only be judged to be ‘real’ if they are perceived to be the words which the artist would use anyway, when not recording a song; or alternatively, as describing an experience that the songwriter or performer has had in their own life. Finally, under this definition very little of the content of any video game would be considered ‘real’ unless it was perceived to provide a mediated experience equivalent to that of unmediated circumstances. In our interviews and focus groups, claims about the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’ which appeared to conform to these understandings frequently appeared as relative, rather than absolute, judgements about the degrees of authenticity of a subject, or judgements about the extent to which the process of

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­ ediation has rendered a subject differently from that which it is in m unmediated circumstances. Dorr (1983) also proposed two further ways of understanding claims of the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’ by suggesting that, rather than asking simply how true to life representations are, what matters most is how authentic they are perceived to be in addressing young people’s concerns. Put another way, she argued that claims to what is ‘real’ are claims about what information should be taken seriously. Maire Messenger-Davies (1997) agrees that the concept of ‘taking something seriously’ is useful because it ‘avoids the existential difficulties of defining objective reality’ associated with other definitions. These further ways in which we might claim something to be ‘real’ or ‘unreal’ both accept that all representations are mediated, but do not use this as a basis for judging reality. Instead, ‘reality’ refers to a ‘fabricated experience’ (Dorr 1983: 201) that conforms, in some way, to real life. Within this broader understanding, the definition of the ‘real’ moves between the perception of something as possible or as probable. For example, the ability to jump off a ten-storey building uninjured in a computer game, or a storyline in a television drama about an alien invasion, or a song about the absence of religion, might all be judged to be ‘real’ because they are possible, if unlikely. However, each of these examples might not be considered ‘real’, because although they might be possible, they are not probable. By this account, something is only considered real if it is probable or representative, or as Dorr (1983: 205) defines it, ‘like something I, or personal acquaintances, have experienced’. Due to the often fragmented and contradictory nature of the talk in our focus groups it was not always possible to establish which of these three definitions of the ‘real’ young people were drawing on. Indeed, participants often appeared to move between different definitions, sometimes within the same sentence. However, these three definitions remain useful because they match more closely than any others (Hawkins 1977; Buckingham 1993) what the young people we spoke to appeared to mean when they made claims about what was ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ in their talk about popular culture. We are, however, not just interested in young people’s judgements about what is possible, probable or equivalent to ‘real’ life. We are also interested in what these claims tell us about how young people position themselves in relation to sources of power in that real world. In this respect, we treat their claims about what is ‘real’ and ‘unreal’, not simply as claims about the possible, the probable and the authentic, but also, as Buckingham (1993) suggests, as social acts that reflect,

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and respond to, the distribution of power. As we explained in Chapter 4, Buckingham argues that talk about popular culture is not a neutral act, providing straightforward evidence of what people think or believe; it is inextricably linked to the context in which it is spoken. At one level, this means that utterances have to be understood as a production of the immediate context in the focus group or interview itself. Responses are inevitably tailored to meet the perceived expectations of interviewers and peers (Buckingham 2000: 212). At another level, discussion of how faithfully popular culture represents the ‘real’ is also a discussion of how power outside the room is seen and judged. And as we show, the talk we heard was revealing of how popular culture was used to think about these different forms of power – in particular, media power. Claims of the ‘unreal’ as a ‘media literate’ discourse Perhaps the most obvious source of power for young people, and the one talked about most often in our interviews and focus groups, is the media itself. When talking about the media as a source of power, claims about what was ‘unreal’ or ‘fake’ were instances of what Buckingham (2000: 76) refers to as a ‘media literate’ discourse. Buckingham argues that, when young people use various devices to condemn media forms and specific media texts – by describing them as ‘unreal’, they are in fact adopting a particular media literate discourse in which they are positioning themselves at a distance from the media as a source of power (most commonly as a source of influence) and claiming autonomy. For example, Buckingham identifies examples of this media literate discourse in the way the young people condemn the media for its sensationalism, its commercial motivations and its apparent misrepresentation of political issues. In particular, he finds that judgements about news bias were frequently deployed as part of a media literate discourse. In our broader study of young people’s talk about popular culture, we found that this discourse manifested itself slightly differently. Our young people’s observations about the generic conventions of the media, and particularly their claims about what was ‘unreal’ or ‘fake’, were frequently couched in media literate discourse, in order to claim autonomy, and hence to deny media as a source of power. Television and the real Young people’s frequent appeals to a media literate discourse through claims about the ‘unreal’ were most obvious in their talk

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about ­ television. In discussion about fictional television genres, participants frequently drew on a media literate discourse by reference to the ‘fake’ or ‘unreal’ nature of the storylines and acting styles (or quality of acting). In so doing, they expressed their sense of agency over the text. As one respondent said of the television drama Hollyoaks: It’s so wooden. There’s so much going on at once. The acting is awful. The storylines are ridiculous. It’s just the most ridiculous drivel I’ve ever seen in my entire life ... At least in Coronation Street and EastEnders it is slightly more real. (Focus group 8)

Here the participant is claiming that Hollyoaks is ‘unreal’ in the sense that it is inauthentic (‘wooden’; ‘The acting is awful’), improbable (‘There’s so much going on at once’) and impossible (‘The storylines are ridiculous’). But note too the more positive judgement made of the realism of other soaps. While being critical of what they watch, they allow for degrees of realism, which is revealed in the comparison between soaps. The following exchange about the relative merits of Hollyoaks and EastEnders is revealing of how participants distance themselves from fictional television genres, while also using a notion of ‘degrees of realism’ to explain their judgements: b:

I watch Hollyoaks every day. I think the storylines are better in Hollyoaks, but I think the acting is probably better in EastEnders. I think some of the acting in Hollyoaks is pretty poor. f: They are all too perfect, they are all good looking people and it’s just like not real. g: Everyone says EastEnders and Hollyoaks are realistic, but who dies every day? There is always someone dying every week. e: I think EastEnders is fairly realistic. a: More realistic than Hollyoaks? f: I think sometimes EastEnders has more realistic stories line than Hollyoaks. i: But I thought you said the storylines were better in Hollyoaks? e: There is more exaggeration and they are more interesting, but not realistic. f: Hollyoaks drags the storylines out, though, they just keep on going. It just keeps going and you get bored of it. (Focus group 3) e:

One of our other respondents made a similar point about the degrees of realism, and how this affected them as a viewer: I think because Hollyoaks is a bit less realistic than EastEnders, it makes you think. ... Because it is a fantasy world but is still real, it makes you think more than the realistic stuff. (Focus group 5)

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In these exchanges, and in the comparisons being drawn, our respondents work to create a distance between themselves and the programme, a distance that is revealed in talk of the plot, acting and so on. But at the same time, they also reveal, in the fact of the comparisons, that these programmes differ in their realism, in their capacity to represent how the world really works. We would suggest that this is indicative of the use of popular culture to constitute knowledge of the world. But in making this claim, we are not suggesting that all soaps are windows on the world, or rather that their function as such depends on the extent to which they are seen as real. Hence the following exchange in which EastEnders is dismissed as a source of truth of any kind. i:

What is good about EastEnders?

b: Nothing. f:

It started alright I used to watch it ages and ages and ages ago and it was good then it just sort of dropped. d: You’re grown up maybe? b: No. f: No, I think the characters just got worse and more unrealistic. d: The acting quality. f: Not even the acting, the characters themselves. b: The acting is bad though ... i: Does a soap opera ever make you think? About teenage pregnancy or drugs or crime or whatever? f: No, because you know it’s fake, maybe a little bit. You think, ‘OK if I do drugs, I might die’. c: But you already knew that. f: Exactly. i: So you never say you learnt something from watching EastEnders? b: No. f: No. i: Or Hollyoaks? f: Just never give your first baby away, it comes back to haunt you later. (Focus group 5)

It pays to compare the evaluation of fictional television as a source of knowledge with the treatment of factual television. In their discussions of factual television genres, such as documentaries and news, young people still positioned themselves at a distance from such texts, but did so less through claims about what was ‘real’ and what was ‘unreal’, and more through claims about ‘bias’. One participant claimed that, ‘news is so biased, you can’t really believe it’ (Focus group 4). This was typical of the responses of the young people we spoke to. It appeared that they were less willing to make explicit judgements about factual television

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as being inauthentic, improbable or impossible, but they still positioned themselves at a distance from such texts. One interviewee, when asked if she watched news and current affairs programmes, told us: Yeah, I watch those but they are so biased ... You do realise just how biased the news are [sic] and how they still put spin on things now. ... I still watch it, I just know it’s biased, I take it with a pinch of salt, so I’ll watch it, and then I’ll sort of go and look on the internet about something else, and sort of compare things more, rather than just taking it at face value. (Interview 1)

Despite the presence of this media literate discourse in young people’s talk about television, there were a number of occasions on which respondents were less interested in displaying their critical acumen as television viewers, and instead accepted that they were subject to some degree of influence by some television content. This influence was acknowledged when the programmes were deemed ‘real’ or authentic. In the first quotation below, one participant (‘E’) explains clearly the thought that the greater the perceived degree of realism, or ‘authenticity’, the greater the ‘impact’. In the second quotation, each of the three participants also position themselves close to particular factual texts as sources of ‘interest’ through claims that they are authentic, but do so in various ways, either through claims of a lack of bias, the trustworthiness of the text or its perceived ‘reality’. d: The only realistic things are documentaries and the news. e:

I think if it is more realistic it has more of an impact on you. Like some of the Dispatches programmes. If they are realistic, you feel like that is really going on; and we need to be aware of that. But if it’s exaggerated, then you kind of just get more enjoyment out of it and think that is funny or that is sad, but that is not how it really is. (Focus group 5) c:

Did you watch Law and Order, those two episodes with Louis Theroux? That is all obviously real, and he’s gone there and documented it and filmed there and stuff, and I think that’s more interesting than, say, a fictional or nonfictional kind of story. e: Also it gives like an unbiased opinion. s: So you trust it more. c: Yeah, because you know it’s real. (Focus group 11)

In discussion of factual programming, our respondents relax their media savviness, and treat what they watch as representing the real world. When they are talking about fictional television, they are more guarded, more conscious of the mediation process, but they still allow for the possibility that soap operas can approximate to reality, and as such provide insights into the way the world works.

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Video games Young people’s frequent use of a media literate discourse was also apparent in their talk about video games. In particular, young people were very keen to point out that they understood the distinction between the ‘unreal’ (inauthentic), mediated world of video games and the ‘real’ (authentic), unmediated world. In so doing, young people constructed themselves as critically aware players of video games, insulated from influence. In the following focus group extract, for example, participants describe their experiences of video games as ‘against reality’, ‘not you’ and ‘something they would not normally do’, which, they conclude, justifies the lack of connection between how you behave in the game and how you might behave in the real world. f:

They [gamers] enjoy it because that is something they would not normally do. a: It’s not you. c: It’s against reality. e: There are no consequences to it, if you run over an old lady in San Andreas. You don’t care and if you did, you just turn it off. I doubt you’d care too much. (Focus group 6)

Such distinctions between the real and the unreal were frequently tied to participants’ claims to be aware that these games are constructed according to certain conventions, and that gamers are aware of this while playing. In the following conversation about the video game Grand Theft Auto, for example, participants refer to the ‘invincibility’ and ‘freedom’ of the characters. These terms are used to demonstrate the players’ understanding of the difference between the ‘real’ world and the world of video games, and to minimise the potential influence of the games. i:

We’ll talk about Grand Theft Auto first. What can you do in that?

a: Basically you’ve got the freedom to do whatever you want. b:

Yeah, exactly. you can’t do in real life because there’s so many rules and regulations and everything. You can go up to a policeman and kill them if you want. c: But would you really want to do that in real life? a: Obviously you wouldn’t want to do that, but you can do it there without getting ... b: You’re not really going to die for that, your character will, but you’re not. (Focus group 9) a: Which

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By distancing themselves in this way, young people were able to deny that the content of video games might affect their behaviour. But in doing this, they were, of course, creating a clear contrast between the rules and behaviour that apply in the real world, and those that apply in the game world. As one focus group member said, after being asked whether there was anything to worry about in the fact that violent games are so popular: ‘No, because it’s not real. People get too worried about it. It’s not like we are all going to get guns and go on a killing spree’ (Focus group 2). Such arguments are common. It was rare to find players of video games who saw the real and the imaginary realms coinciding. Occasionally, though, this did happen. In the following comment, one of our participants contrasts the unreality of television programmes with the reality of video games: f:  Usually

when you see documentaries on TV on World War 2 ... a lot of that is toned down, and you don’t really get a good idea of the situations they are in. But when you are in the game [Call of Duty] it does make you think, because there is so much going on around you, so you are surrounded by people, you are being shot at and you think to yourself, what if this was me for real? It’s such a scary situation. (Focus group 6)

For this participant, what appeared to make video games more potent, more ‘real’, was the way in which they offered the opportunity to interact with the events being represented. So while it was rare to find players who saw their games as modelling reality, it did occur. And, as we have noted, those who stress the ‘unreality’ of games do so by summoning up a real world by means of contrast and validation. Arguably, in both instances the wider world outside, and how it operates, becomes a feature of talk about video games. Television and games as a source of power over others The contrasts and comparisons we have so far discussed are underpinned by a further one: that between our respondents and the mass of ‘others’ who also watch soaps and play games. Buckingham (2000: 88; 1993) argues that the use of a media literate discourse to distance oneself from the media also distances oneself from ‘uncritical’ viewers. In other words, by espousing a media literate discourse there is an implicit assumption that there are others – the mass audience of viewers – who are gullible enough to believe and be influenced by what they watch/play/listen to. As Buckingham (2000: 91) puts it, ‘by

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virtue of their superior critical powers, [those adopting a media literate discourse] are able to “see through” phenomena that delude or mislead lesser mortals’. We found ample evidence of this assumption both implicitly in general conversation and explicitly in conversations about media influence. This is particularly apparent in the following focus group extract, which is taken from a conversation in which all participants had previously claimed not to be influenced by video games. i:

Do you think that a lot of people can’t distinguish between the game and reality? a: Yeah. b: Yeah. c: Yeah, definitely. d: Yeah. b: Yeah, actually ... we were saying a lot of soldiers sign up and they still think it’s a video game. They don’t take it as actual real life, and [that] you can get shot and you will die and it will hurt. (Focus group 13)

This is significant because it reveals that, although young people may generally position themselves at a distance from the media, they still regard it as an important source of real social power, because they assume it has influence over the mass audience. The perceived influence of the media was especially evident in discussions about children. As one 17-year-old participant said, ‘I reckon at this sort of age [video games] aren’t really [influential], it’s more like an outlet, but if it is at a younger age it could be quite influential’ (Focus group 8). In particular, the younger brothers and sisters of the people we spoke to were understood to be vulnerable to the influence of popular culture because they were perceived as being unable to distinguish between what is ‘real’ and what was ‘unreal’. What was revealing about this was how it led to discussion about where responsibility lay in the real world. Who should protect those vulnerable to the influence of media? Here is one such exchange: a: I

think games only make an impression on you when you’re young. I know this boy, when he was really young he was watching ‘18’ horror films because his mum didn’t really care. And now he does find violence really funny. I think age limits are age limits and that is when you are old enough to watch certain things. b: That’s quite like my little brother, because everything was messed up in our house. He was left in a room to watch whatever he wanted and he played all those games he’s not supposed to play, and now he’s quite violent to

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everyone that comes round. So I would say the games have affected him quite greatly... e: I think the main thing everyone is saying is that if people kept to the age guidelines that were put on things, it wouldn’t affect you. b: But no one does. e: If people did stick to them they wouldn’t be able to play them until they did have the right sense of what is right and wrong. d: Obviously your parents are going to know if you’re going to be easily influenced by something. They’re not going to put you in front of some sort of ‘18’ horror or something. (Focus group 7)

For us, such discussions, sparked by thoughts about media influence and issues of realism, became talk about social order and how it might be achieved. To this extent, such conversations about what popular culture entailed were ‘political’ in that they explored the question of how power is, and should be, exercised. The limits of media literacy The thought that others might be vulnerable to the effects of media, and the way this leads to talk about power and responsibility, does not just apply to the mass of ‘others’. It also applies to our respondents. As we have already seen, they are not always resolute in their media savviness. Young people’s talk about the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’, and their related use of a media literate discourse, is a claim to media literacy, or agency vis-à-vis the media as a source of power. This is not evidence of media literacy, or an actual position of autonomy. In other words, the fact that young people draw upon critical discourses about the media does not necessarily mean they are immune to media influence (Buckingham 2000: 213). Indeed, we found evidence to suggest that young people frequently appeared to reproduce the discourses sustained in the popular culture texts about which they talked. When discussing television programmes such as The X Factor, The Apprentice and Hell’s Kitchen, young people appeared to ‘buy into’ the wider messages in these programmes about a cruel business world and about the authority that success in the business world conferred on someone. In particular, participants seemed to reproduce discourses that positioned business people in a privileged position of power, as the following focus group extract demonstrates. a: I love The Apprentice. c:

You actually learn things from that.

a: Exactly.

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Because it is about business and the ideas. Yeah, you learn different strategies. a: Yeah, you pick up things. a: It kind of gets you ready for real life, like when you go and get a job and stuff. You know what to expect from a boss like Alan Sugar. Or someone like that ... c: Business is harsh, so he needs to be … I think it is good because they will learn lessons, because that is how business really is. a: I think you need people like him and Simon Cowell. I know it sounds harsh but you have to face reality. If you are not good, you are not good. (Focus group 4) b:

In such exchanges, all pretence at being media savvy is lost. The shows become ‘life lessons’, based on the harsh realities of the world as it is. Power is revealed and recognised through the window provided by popular culture. Real music? Although participants often referred to soap operas as unrealistic and claimed to know that playing a video game is not the same as being in the ‘real’ world, statements of this kind were made far less frequently in discussion of popular music. For the young people we spoke to, the thought that popular music might constitute a source of power, or influence, was treated more seriously. While participants rarely used the word ‘real’ in such conversations, the thought that music which was ‘authentic’ was more influential (‘makes you think’) was still apparent and was often expressed through words or phrases such as ‘original’, ‘true’ or ‘relates to you’. Here is an example: i:

What makes a good lyric? it is not, like, there are so many lyrics that are in so many types of music that you hear again and again, and it’s just like really corny or really cheesy. And when you hear something really original, then you tend to remember it. And that is usually stuff that is, like, true and that makes you think as well. b: And you can relate to it. c: Yeah, stuff that relates to you. a: Yeah, I was going to say that. (Focus group 1) a: When

Whereas comments about the conventions and production of television programmes and video games were used to support claims that they were ‘unrealistic’, references to the conventions and production

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of popular music were used to make claims about the authenticity and originality of the text. As one interviewee said, ‘Music is made by the people, for the people’ (Interview 11). By not adopting the same critical media literate discourse in their talk about popular music, our young people represented popular music as a source of power (and influence). This is evident in the following extracts in which participants try to explain how and why music matters to them, in ways that television and video games do not. First, this is a young woman talking about an album in which the songs refer to what happens when the singer’s dad leaves home: ‘Some people can relate to that and sometimes having someone, not necessarily that you follow, but that has been through something that you’ve been through, their music, sort of helps you through that’ (Focus group 8). And here is another testimony to the power of music (compared to television): Say you’re upset, then you’ll look to a song to find something out of it. It depends how you’re feeling. You just take what you can. I’ll watch television, and just watch it; but if I’m feeling sad or whatever, I’ll always just listen to music. I think music makes you think more … With songs, if you’re going through something, you want to talk about your problem. And with songs you can just say, look what they’ve said, like it’s the same, they understand. Whereas with television, it’s not always directly what you’re going through, it’s just a sort of similar situation that you can relate to because you’ve seen it go on around you, rather than it being you. Whereas with songs it’s you, and you’re just relating to the words. (Interview 14)

Such statements, and we heard others like them, speak to the idea that popular music is more ‘real’, or ‘authentic’, and as such it has a more important place in their lives. And this place is earned by the way that music reports true or real feelings about how the world works. Music may not describe the operation of public power (although some songs do), but it can capture the experience of being subject to that power. Social values, reality and other sources of power Young people used their judgements about the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’ in talk about popular culture not just to express their relationship with the media as a source of power, but also in relation to other sources of power represented in media texts. This was most obvious in the way in which some young people spoke of the opportunity video games provided to interact with and even exercise power themselves over different institutions. For example, various participants spoke of how they

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regarded the police and the army as elements of a game, with which they play. Indeed, being in control (within limits) over these sources of power seemed to be one of the pleasures gamers particularly enjoyed, as is evident in the following exchange. i:

That’s the real pleasure is it – it’s the killing feeling? It’s quite fun. And it is more realistic now as well. Laughing a: This doesn’t sound very nice but if you shoot someone, you get blood on the screen, and it’s quite ... i: And you can shoot policemen too. And when you’re playing do you make any discrimination between shooting a policeman and someone else? b: No, because if you do that then you can get their cars and you can get all the army after you eventually, and it’s quite fun, because of their life force. That is what I tend to do, and it’s quite good. (Focus group 1) b:

In such talk, young people are not claiming that they have autonomy over institutions like the police in the real world. But what the virtual world offers is the sensation of playing with the sources of power. Our participants clearly enjoyed the potential video games offered to act against institutions of the state, albeit within the game world. Indeed, this pleasure derived from making a clear distinction between the world of games, where conventional moral rules do not apply, and the ‘real’ world, where they do. As is evident in the discussions both above and below, young people’s claims about the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’ are used to demonstrate their understanding of social rules. Games serve as a space within which breaking these rules has no actual consequences. i:

Is it fun to behave badly [in video games]?

e: Yeah. a: Yeah. e:

Because it’s good to see what happens afterwards, and it’s just interesting because in real life you can’t really do that. a: Like burning Sims. e: Or shutting them in a room, or letting the baby get taken away by social workers ... d: If someone is getting in the way, you can kind of just kill them off. It’s kind of like your own soap and you can pull all the strings and you have control over it. i: When you’re playing Sims, you play it as if it were a soap rather than as if it were real life? d: Yeah, I would say so because you know it’s not quite real, but maybe in some aspects you kind of want it to be so it goes better as a soap than real life.

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There are certain aspects that just aren’t real. Most of it. All of it. (Focus group 10)

As with the comparisons made between soap operas, the contrast made between the real world and the virtual world is revealing of how young people use popular culture to reflect upon the character of the real world, and the rules and powers that operate within it. When asked whether they judged other people by the ways in which they behave in the ‘unreal’ world of video games, most respondents claimed that they did, despite also claiming to perceive video games as not ‘real’. As one participant said: It shows how they would act, if they had that opportunity to act in real life, because, obviously, you’re not going to have these things happen to you in real life, but it shows how people would handle it. I guess they are not thinking completely straight because it’s not real. (Interview 3)

The point again is that the distinction young people make between the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’ in their talk can be read as political, as informing their understanding of how power does and should operate. Conclusion This chapter has explored how young people, in their conversations about popular culture, use it to get a handle on ‘reality’. Discussion of whether a soap opera is realistic, or how soap operas differ in respect of realism, suggests that these programmes are used to think about how the world operates. They provide insights into the operation of power in the public realm. The pleasures of video games, too, are informed by some notion of reality, albeit in the contrasts they establish between the codes that apply in the real and the virtual world. And finally, music is valued for the knowledge it supplies of how people, affected by how the world works, feel about it. We also saw how the use of popular culture was managed through ideas of media literacy or media savviness. These were used to create a distance between the media representations and any pretence at realism. But we saw these distancing practices break down. First, we saw them break down in the accounts of how others might be affected by what they saw or experienced. And secondly, we saw them break down in discussion of the life lessons delivered by talent shows. In particular, we saw it in the way that Simon Cowell and Alan Sugar appeared as authority figures.

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It is true that these insights rarely related, if at all, to conventional notions of politics. But they did connect to our wider conception of the term, in which collective deliberation about the exercise of public power is involved. We can see this revealed even more vividly in the next chapter, where we return to the way in which people like Cowell and Sugar are understood and discussed as arbiters of judgement and as representatives of how the world works.

7

Young citizens and celebrity politicians

If the last chapter was about how young people use popular culture to think about the ‘real world’ and the way it works, then this chapter is about those who are (or might be) charged with running it. The topic is the politician, and how young people – in their talk about popular culture – reflect upon what is required of a politician and who is equipped to deliver on this responsibility. In particular: do celebrities make good representative politicians? The idea of the celebrity politician, at least in the sense we use it here, refers to the person who, having become famous through some realm of popular culture, uses their fame in order to promote a cause or to win an election. Examples of the former are Bob Geldof, Bono, Sting, Angelina Jolie and George Clooney, and there are, of course, many others. Instances of the latter are less common, but Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger stand out. It has been suggested that the celebrity politician is becoming an ever more common feature of contemporary politics, one that raises important questions for the health or otherwise of democracy (West and Orman 2003). On the one hand, it is contended that celebrity politicians represent a ‘dumbing down’ of democratic politics; image is thought to supplant substance in political debate. This problem is compounded by the lack of expertise of the celebrity politician. On the other hand, celebrity politicians are welcomed because they are thought to reinvigorate democratic politics by engaging the disengaged and by democratising an otherwise elitist politics (van Zoonen 2005). This chapter makes no attempt to resolve this debate, but it does offer to contribute to it by reporting on what young people say about celebrity politicians. Too much of the debate about celebrity politics has been confined either to theoretical speculation, or to critical examination of

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individual examples of the breed; too little attention has been devoted to the reception they have received from voters and others. This is why we deliberately steered all our focus groups and interviewees to the question of celebrity politics. Sometimes, in fact, the topic arose unbidden, but on other occasions we prompted it. This was, in part, because, as may be obvious, celebrity politicians are an embodiment of the connection between politics and popular culture. But it was also because, in the debate about re-engaging young people in politics, it has been assumed that celebrities were the key (see for example, the US and UK ‘Rock the Vote’ campaigns of the 1980s and onwards). The thought was that celebrity glamour and fame could be used to re-connect disillusioned youth with the political process. A recent example of this argument can be found in the BBC’s defence of the large salary paid to the DJ Chris Moyles. The Corporation argued that Moyles’s young fans were led, through him, to encounters with the news (Newsbeat) and with current affairs (Radio 1 documentaries), and hence to political awareness (BBC Trust 2011). Being aware of this background, we were curious as to whether young people were, in reality, inclined to follow the injunction and example of celebrities. What we found, in trying to get an answer, was that – for the most part – our respondents had a very particular idea of what was required of a politician, and that this had implications for what type of celebrity they were prepared to listen to or to have represent them. They might be willing to accept that popular musicians, like Eminem, can tell them something about how the world works, saying of one of his albums that ‘it’s quite factual’ and that they ‘trust’ him not to have ‘made up’ the lyrics (Interview 23). But this trust in Eminem’s veracity does not translate automatically into a willingness to have someone like him represent them politically. As we found, if celebrities were going to perform this role, our respondents were more inclined to go for figures like Simon Cowell or Jeremy Clarkson. We found that young people, suspicious of politicians’ motives, felt that they could judge the authenticity of celebrities and, through this, relate better to celebrities’ political causes. Yet rather than approaching celebrity politics as a radical challenge to the politics they distrusted, young citizens remained within culturally established discourses of hierarchy and power. They remained sceptical about the efficacy of celebrity politicians who failed to display the conventional markers of power. For our respondents, maturity, seriousness, masculinity and business success were signals of authority that legitimated access to public politics. But before we look in more detail at how young people

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think about celebrity politicians, we need to say a bit more by way of background. Background: the rise of the celebrity politician We have chosen to focus upon one particular type of celebrity politician, the star who chooses to engage in politics. There are, in fact, many different forms of the phenomenon, and some debate about how we should define it (see West and Orman 2003; Marsh et al. 2011). While attention most commonly focuses on the celebrity activist, and on events like Live 8, when, it seemed, a group of musicians persuaded the world’s most powerful leaders to change their policy on developing country debt, the celebrity politician also can encompass the traditional politician who adopts the accoutrements of showbusiness to secure election (Street 2004). In concentrating on the first type of celebrity politician we are contributing to the debate over the political impact that celebrity politicians might have. This impact is measured in a number of ways. First, there is the impact on the quality of political discourse: do celebrity politicians trade more on their image than their arguments? Secondly, there is the impact on engagement: do celebrity politicians raise awareness of, and involvement in, a cause or campaign? Thirdly, there is impact on accountability: is there a problem in the fact that celebrity politicians, at least of the kind that we are considering here, are not formally elected and are not answerable for their actions in the way that a traditional politician might be? And finally, there is a related impact issue that has to do with the decisions celebrity politicians make: do they have the expertise (or the incentives to acquire it) necessary for responsible political decision making? These questions are to be found in most discussions of celebrity politicians. The discussion does not necessarily divide crudely between the suggestion that celebrity politicians are all bad or all good, but is more nuanced. Celebrity politicians may be good at raising awareness of a cause, but not at appreciating its complexities (for an indication of these debates, see Corner and Pels 2003; West and Orman 2003; van Zoonen 2005; Ross 2011). The political and cultural elite tend to regard the modern celebrity as the symptom of a worrying cultural shift ‘towards a culture that privileges the momentary, the visual and the sensational over the enduring, the written, and the rational’ (Turner 2004: 4; see also Hyde 2009). It is argued that celebrities lack appropriate expertise and there-

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fore trivialise ‘serious political issues’ (West and Oman 2003: 118). The replacement of ‘proper’ news by celebrity gossip and so-called infotainment only exacerbates the problem. The assumption is that democracies require rational and well-informed citizens, and that soft news and celebrity culture may not produce such citizens (Delli Carpini and Williams 2001). Instead, celebrity culture celebrates ‘ordinariness’ (Bonner 2003) and privileges the private self (Rojek 2001). But while for many commentators this process threatens democratic culture, others celebrate it as evidence of a democratisation of the public sphere. Rather than infotainment, says Hartley (1999), we get ‘democratainment’. There is always a danger, in setting out the debate like this, of suggesting that we are faced with a simple choice: of siding either with those who condemn celebrity politics or with those who welcome it. It is rash to do either. Rather, we suggest that it is necessary to investigate more carefully the democratic potential of emerging entertainment cultures. Hence, in this chapter we take seriously the possibility that celebrity culture may connect young people with the politics of the public sphere, precisely because it represents a possible alternative to current political structures. Not only may celebrities represent socially and politically marginalised groups, but they may also offer alternative channels for political communication. While some choose to employ established forms of political campaigning such as demonstrations and public speeches (such as Joanna Lumley, the actor and campaigner for the civic rights of Gurkhas), others incorporate their political message into their art, a tradition that includes Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, but extends through to Public Enemy and Rage Against The Machine, and beyond (Lynskey, 2011). Researching celebrity politics While much discussion has been generated by the argument about celebrity politics, rather less light has been shed on the details of how people actually responded to its various incarnations. There are exceptions to this general rule, where researchers have tried to isolate the impact that celebrities have on political behaviour and attitudes. Research into the mass effects of celebrity politics, however, remains at a formative stage. There is experimental evidence (Jackson and Darrow 2005; Jackson 2007) that suggests that a measurable ‘celebrity effect’ can be achieved. Campaigns endorsed by a celebrity can benefit from their support, but this depends on the celebrity – not all celebrities are equally credible or persuasive. Real-world tests of such effects are less

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assured in their results. Some do indicate that there may be a discernible endorsement effect (Pease and Brewer 2008) – for example, that Oprah Winfrey’s support for Barack Obama secured additional votes for him (Garthwaite and Moore 2008). There is evidence too of celebrities having an impact on the willingness of young people to vote in elections (Austin et al. 2008). Others have, though, warned of exaggerating celebrity effects. One team of researchers, for example, has cast doubts on the power of celebrities to ‘make the news’; that is, to force an issue onto the front pages or into bulletins (Thrall et al. 2008). Furthermore, we would note that much of this research took place in the US. It may be that the impact of celebrity politics is dependent upon the political system in which it occurs (Ross 2011). The weaker, more decentralised US party system may be more hospitable to celebrity politics than the UK’s more centralised party and electoral systems. This note of scepticism is a feature of some of the qualitative research in this field. Nick Couldry and Tim Markham (2007), for instance, report indifference to celebrities amongst the people they spoke to and tracked. They (2007: 717) argue that people who have a strong interest in celebrity culture ‘are the least likely to vote, and their political interest is low, as is their social efficacy’. In their study ‘there were few, if any, cases where people themselves linked celebrity narratives to what they defined as public issues of any sort’ (Couldry and Markham 2007: 418). Neither approach allows researchers to comment on the reasons why certain respondents react to particular celebrities in distinct ways – only that they do. For us, this is a key issue. While it may be that there are contextual differences to be considered, it is also crucial to investigate the political meanings that celebrities hold for citizens. For this reason, our research follows the approach taken by Couldry and Markham, both in its UK location and in its concern with citizens’ perceptions of celebrity politics. We do not challenge Couldry and Markham’s argument that people with high levels of interest in celebrity culture show little interest in politics. Our research was not designed to explore this particular relationship. Instead, we are primarily concerned with the factors that may mediate citizens’ responses to celebrity politics. Rather than treating celebrity culture as homogenous, we focus on the ways in which audiences engage with different aspects of the celebrity. It may be that attractiveness or credibility (Basil 1996; Jackson 2007), or perceptions of expertise and trustworthiness (Hague et al. 2008; Henneberg and Chen 2008), determine whether a celebrity is taken seriously as a politi-

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cal figure. Citizens may not respond to all celebrities in the same way, just as celebrities differ from each other (Jackson and Darrow 2005). Equally, a celebrity’s persuasiveness may be mediated by citizens’ attitudes towards politics (Wood and Herbst 2007: 154). We see aspects of all of these in the way our respondents talked about celebrities. Like Couldry and Markham, we report on the comments of individuals rather than on a large-scale survey or experiment; unlike them, our research concentrates on young people. This is, in part, because of the anxiety focused on young people generally in relation to politics – their disillusionment with mainstream forms of political participation, such as voting and party membership (Fahmy 2003), and their perception that formal politics is inauthentic and distant (Bennett et al. 2009: 106–107). But it is also because, while they appear to be disconnected from politics in the traditional sense, young people’s lives are strongly connected with the business of celebrities and celebrity culture (Turner 2004: 41–45). It is this that lies behind the use of celebrities to re-engage young people in politics. One of the more blatant was New Labour’s partnership with bands like Blur and Oasis, and the attempt to piggy-back on the ‘Cool Britannia’ moment in the mid-1990s (Harris 2004). In order to capture the full extent to which celebrities may engage citizens in politics, we continue to deploy a broad definition of ‘politics’, one that includes Leonardo Di Caprio’s eco-site (www.leonardodi​ caprio.com) and George Clooney’s Sudan campaign. It also includes references to politics and politicians in songs – such as that to George Bush in Eminem’s ‘Mosh’ or Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’. We also, though, want to allow for the possibility that reality television series such as The X Factor or The Apprentice may also provide a site in which celebrities are seen in political terms. Our argument is that, if we want to analyse more precisely the role of celebrities in political life, we need not only to operate with a broadened notion of politics, but also to be aware of the possibility that celebrities become ‘political’ not just through their deliberate involvement in causes and campaigns, but by, as it were, default, when what they say or do provide a focus for public discourse and debate. In this spirit, we report here on the conversations we heard that seemed to reveal important insights into the way in which celebrities were linked to politics in the minds of young people. Reacting to celebrities: from Bono to Simon Cowell Rather than focusing on pre-selected aspects of celebrities’ identities or celebrity endorsement of a specific campaign, we approached the

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c­ elebrity phenomenon discursively, as ‘a product of media representations and the way in which audiences appropriate meanings into their own everyday lives and concerns’ (Turner 2004: 8; his emphasis). In practice, this meant enabling our respondents, as much as was possible, to focus on their likes and dislikes. In many of our conversations, as we have noted, respondents referred to celebrity culture without having been explicitly invited to do so. In their comments about musicians, for example, they talked not only about musicians’ artistic performances, but also about their intertextually constructed celebrity images (Marshall 1997: 58). Our argument draws on this material, but also on our interpretation of the answers that respondents gave when we explicitly asked them to talk about the meanings of celebrity politics. We elicited such responses by asking them to name a celebrity who in their opinion would be a good Prime Minister and then by listening to the responses of others in the focus group. While Bono and Bob Geldof have tended to dominate the public perception of the typical ‘celebrity politician’, our respondents were largely uninterested or unimpressed by either of them. In common with the findings of other celebrity endorsement research (see, for example, Jackson and Darrow 2005), our study suggested that celebrities differ in their potential to connect citizens with a political cause. We also found that many of our respondents reacted positively to examples of celebrity politics because of their attitude towards formal government politics. Celebrities to these young citizens represented a welcome alternative to elected politicians, whom they distrusted. In the eyes of many, the fact that someone defends a particular political cause ‘because it is their job’ called into question the genuine nature of their political motives. Hence, this exchange about the relative merits of Coldplay and Gordon Brown: a: If you like, say, Coldplay, and you really like Coldplay, and they would kind

of say something, I would be more inclined to listen to them than let’s say … b: Gordon Brown. a: Yeah. c: It’s not their job to do politics, so you believe them. … Because they are your idols. (Focus group 11)

The problem of being compared unfavourably to superstar rock musicians, though, was not the only difficulty that traditional politicians faced. We also discovered that young people, perhaps as a direct result of their exposure to celebrity culture, expected or needed to know what politicians were like ‘as people’ in order to judge them.

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A few weeks into the period during which we gathered our primary data, a public scandal erupted over the expenses claimed by Members of Parliament (MPs). The scandal, and the ensuing public investigation, received extensive media coverage and several of our respondents referred to the event as a reason for their lack of confidence in politicians. Undoubtedly the MPs’ misbehaviour prompted some of the cynical views we heard. However, our findings indicate that in order to gain young citizens’ attention as well as their trust, politicians may have to overcome a more fundamental difficulty: the limited access that young people feel they have to politicians’ private lives. Why this matters is because of the view that only by knowing the private person can you judge their ‘true beliefs’. This view emerged through the frequent suggestion, made by our respondents, that they had knowledge of what celebrities were like, and that this gave a reason to trust them. This is apparent in the following exchange about Kanye West: d: Like, if there was a man who is … a politician, but I didn’t really know who

he was, saying exactly the same thing as Kanye West was ... b: You’d listen to Kanye West. d: I’d listen to that. Because if you are watching the television and there is a man on there, talking about, like, doing a speech about something, you’d, like, skip. But if Kanye West is talking about the same thing you’d sit there and watch it. b: Wow! Kanye West. i: Why? What has Kanye West got? Why would you listen to him? d: I don’t know, I think it’s just status. c: He’s just a legend. (Focus group 12)

In the eyes of these respondents, fame was a measure of a celebrity’s standing, and this, in turn, entitled them to speak authoritatively on other matters. This might suggest that well-known politicians, such as the Prime Minister, can rely on an already existing audience, rather than having to prove that he or she is worth listening to. However, becoming a ‘legend’ requires more than becoming a familiar and recognisable public figure. As the next exchange illustrates, our respondents worked with the assumption that anyone famous has a public and a private identity. They accepted that the former requires a certain element of performance, but assumed that the latter is a reflection of that person’s true identity. Our respondents were suspicious of political efforts that were routinely ‘part of someone’s job’, and were looking for political causes that were ‘genuinely’ close to someone’s heart. Many indicated that a public person’s private life provided them with the clues

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that they needed to judge whether a political concern was genuine and to be trusted: i:

Would you trust her [reality television star the late Jade Goody] more than someone like Gordon Brown? a: Yeah, I probably would, probably because she’s been in the media attention and obviously she’s been in Big Brother, so you see what she’s really like. As opposed to a politician who says things just to please everyone and make himself look good. (Interview 2)

Our respondents presumed that they had almost unlimited access to celebrities’ public and private lives. This may be a product, as Chris Rojek (2001: 11) has argued, of how celebrity images are produced and marketed across a range of media platforms, and of how pleasure in them is provided by glimpses of a celebrity’s ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ identity (Dyer 1986; Turner et al. 2000; Holmes 2005). However cynical the processes involved, however illusionary the impression created, there was a sense that celebrities were knowable and known. And these assumptions played into the understanding of the relationship of celebrities and politics. Certain celebrities are deemed to know ‘what it is like out there’, by virtue of how their private experience and public communication connect. More importantly, they are thereby deemed to better ‘represent’ the people than does a traditional politican: [H]is [Eminem’s] songs he writes about himself and his life and [what] has happened to him. So if you listen to some of the lyrics they are [about] what goes on in our society today, so I think you can relate to the people better than, say, Gordon Brown can. (Interview 5)

These sentiments echo a theme that we encountered throughout our focus groups and interviews. Politicians – unlike celebrities – are required to behave in particular ways because of the nature of the job. They do not have the opportunity to speak from personal experience. Our respondents’ positive attitude to celebrity politics represented a challenge to the traditional conduct of politics. Yet while celebrities seemed more genuine and trustworthy than politicians, our respondents did not advocate a radical restructuring of the political system. In particular, despite the criticisms they made of elected representatives, they held to a quite traditional view of ‘the politician’. As they discussed the suitability of different celebrities for political leadership, it became apparent that for the majority of our respondents it seemed inconceivable that a radically different form of politics could ever become estab-

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lished. And contained in this thought was another one: only people of a particular (conventional) type are suited to politics and political leadership. Old, serious, rich and male: what it means to be a politician In fact, our respondents were a mixture of the conventional and the unconventional in their attitudes to politics. On the one hand, they were willing to see politics as a postmodern ‘performance’. But on the other hand, they operated within a very traditional value structure. This ambivalence was most apparent in their perspective on celebrity politicians. While they were willing to see celebrities as types of political leader or representative, they were also insistent that those celebrities should not be ‘fake’, and should pass as credible sources of expertise and authority. The latter were marked in very conventional terms. Age, a serious demeanour, financial success and masculinity were mentioned by many as indicators of authority, required for the successful performance of the role as ‘respected politician’. Put another way: all the young people we spoke to equated youth with a lack of authority. One of our interviewees, for example, suggested that Jade Goody had less chance than Kylie Minogue of being seen as a credible advocate for a cancer awareness campaign. Both had suffered from the disease, but it was Kylie who was deemed able to act as the authoritative representative of other patients: I think Kylie is more of a role model because she’s done more good stuff in her life, and she is old as well. I don’t know how old, but she’s definitely over middle age. And Jade was, like, young, loud, sort of like a teenager still, but in a 20 year old body, and it doesn’t show. It’s not really an idol you want kids to look up to, someone like Jade Goody, but I would say Kylie was more of a role model to have for cancer sort of thing. (Interview 21)

Seeing youth as a hindrance to success as a public political actor did not emerge just in conversations about celebrities and their political campaigns. When we asked them to comment on their general interest in politics, our respondents revealed a perception of themselves as citizens with limited power. They explained this in terms of the absence of a vote, but in other ways too: a: Me personally, I’m at an age where I personally couldn’t give a crap about

what’s happening. b: Yeah same.

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a: That’s for my parents to be thinking, I don’t care. b: My

dad is, like, ‘watch the news, you should know what’s going on in politics’, but I can’t vote right now so when I get to the age when I should be voting then I’ll … c: So when I get to that age, then I’ll start thinking about it, but for now there is nothing I can do to change anything, so leave that to them who can. (Focus group 4)

Many others echoed these sentiments. They declared themselves to have little time for politics, but they did acknowledge that turning 18 and having the right to vote might change their attitude. But what we might surmise is that, insofar as youth was associated with political impotence, they looked to people older than themselves to act as political representatives. In doubting the value of Jade Goody as an advocate of a cause, of being able to influence public policy, they were giving vent to their own sense of marginality. These anxieties were revealed not simply in the fact of age, but in the way it was represented, the identities associated with it. We talk more about these identities in Chapter 8, but it is important to point out here that some of our respondents saw particular representations of youth as contributing to young people’s political marginality. This was evident in the remarks of the young man, quoted above, who rated ‘definitely over middle age’ Kylie Minogue as having a better chance of success in politics than Jade Goody. The explanation was not simply that she was young, but also that she was ‘loud, sort of like a teenager’ (Interview 21). Descriptions like this reveal that, in the eyes of our respondents, anyone seeking to make a difference in politics must behave as an ‘adult’. Being ‘loud’, but also being funny, were forms of behaviour that many identified as unacceptable within formal politics. While several of our respondents indicated that they would like there to be more humour in politics, they were dubious about the chances for political success of comedians or otherwise boisterous celebrities. Our young people suggested that, in order to be accepted by members of the public, unconventional forms of behaviour must still meet culturally established notions of what politicians are like. One of our interviewees, for example, suggested that the immensely popular radio DJ Chris Moyles (average weekly audience: 7.25 million), who is well known in the UK for his tendency to make ‘laddish’ jokes of doubtful taste, would not make a good politician: i:

OK, some other people, Chris Moyles, Radio 1. No I can’t see that at all, because he’s a bit silly.

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i:

Too silly to be a politician? Too comical. (Interview 5)

In contrast, the pop singer Lily Allen was trusted because she didn’t look ‘stupid’ and ‘dresses normal’. As one of our focus group participants explained: b: You take her point of view. You don’t listen and think that’s true. You, like,

take her point of view and then get thinking. (Focus group 2)

Seriousness, then, could compensate for age in the judgement made of who could or could not represent young people and act as a politician. The other side to this was that age could counter possible perceptions of ‘silliness’ or irresponsibility. Jeremy Clarkson, the famously politically incorrect host of ‘BBC’s leading lads’ television show’ Top Gear (Chalus 2008), was mentioned by many as a celebrity with the ability to speak for the people. This was because Clarkson’s public persona accorded with an understanding of what politicians were supposed to be like. In contrast to Chris Moyles’s ‘silly’ performance, Clarkson’s aggressive style of argument fitted what many saw as the role of the politician: Um, well, I agree he [Jeremy Clarkson] seems like a good politician because he has a boisterous personality and his views are one-sided, and most of the politicians that I’ve met in person are like that. (Interview 6)

What we heard in responses like this is an interplay between the idea of the celebrity and the idea of the politician. Our respondents were not simply comparing the two. They were thinking of celebrities as politicians, and taking seriously this possibility – both as something to welcome and to be wary of. At the same time as they were reflecting on the politics of the celebrity, they were also developing a picture of the politician. The portrait of the successful politician that emerged across focus groups and interviews was one of a serious, argumentative and mature person. This conventional image was complemented by two further features – wealth and masculinity. One of the other celebrities who featured regularly in our discussions was the music entrepreneur Simon Cowell, creator of The X Factor, Pop Idol and Britain’s Got Talent, television talent shows on which he has also appeared as one of the celebrity expert judges. As we saw in Chapter 6, he was seen by some as the embodiment of power in the contemporary world. It is true that some respondents wondered whether he abused this power, when, in p ­ articular,

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he ‘is nasty to kids’ (Focus group 1). However, even those who were unhappy with his demeanour agreed that he was to be taken seriously: i:

You said he [Simon Cowell] was ‘powerful’, what did you mean by that? c: In a way I think he is probably powerful because he is so rich. I know that sounds really stupid, but I think money kind of gives people a sense of power, even though it might not literally. But they seem like they do, and because he is a really successful person, I think it gives him power as well. (Focus group 8)

Our respondents tended to view such success as both an indicator and a source of power. What, though, is significant for us is that this success–power relationship is understood as giving a ‘voice’ to particular individuals. They are not only able to speak, but their pronouncements are taken seriously. More than this, their opinions are deemed to carry greater weight – they have been proven in competition. A successful business person, for many of the young citizens that we spoke to, was someone who knew what was best: i:

Does he know what he is talking about, Cowell?

f: Yeah. b:

That is why he is so rich.

e: Successful. b:

Obviously got something right. ... a: That’s just like Gordon Ramsay in [reality television show] Hell’s Kitchen, he knows what he is talking about. So he is someone who can say if you are crap, and he can give you advice, and if you don’t take it … and so that’s the same as Simon Cowell, because they’ve made it. f: Yeah that’s true, they are one of the richest or biggest of their time, so it’s alright for them to say, kind of ... (Focus group 4)

This is another aspect of the dialogue in which our respondents are engaged. While there is no direct reference to the formal political realm, there is a concern with poltical issues in the form of who is given a voice and how the authority of that voice is to be discerned. But when pressed, respondents do make a connection between such judgements and conventional politics. The qualities revealed in business success are seen to translate into the qualities required in politics. So when we asked if Simon Cowell might make a good Prime Minister, we were told:

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c:

If he’s willing to tell the truth and do what’s necessary to get the best person, then surely he’d be the same for the country, [he’d be] willing to do what the country needs.

And when we asked the same question in respect of Alan Sugar of The Apprentice: e:

He’s not very nice, I know that much, but then he knows what’s best like Simon Cowell, so it’s kind of like the same kind of thing. (Focus group 10)

Such views – in which commercial success and political talent were equated – were widely shared, but were not universal. Some young people were reluctant to make the connection an automatic one. For them, business achievements alone were not enough to qualify a celebrity for political leadership. What entrepreneurs like Simon Cowell, Alan Sugar and Gordon Ramsay also had in common was their gender. So another marker of political ability was masculinity. While some of our participants recognised that older women might be politically able, they rated women less highly than men. This was evident in a discussion of the other judges, besides Cowell, on The X Factor. These included: Louis Walsh, the manager of successful bands such as Westlife and Boyzone; Cheryl Cole, then a member of Girls Aloud, who had had 20 consecutive UK Top 10 singles; and Dannii Minogue who had enjoyed a career as a singer since the 1980s, with several hit singles to her name. But it was only Cowell whom our respondents seemed to accept as an authoritative voice: b:

I love Simon Cowell I quite like him a: Everything goes back to him though, it is always about his opinion, the other judges give their opinions but it never actually … b: The thing is though that Simon Cowell is the only one who actually knows what he is on about, Dannii Minogue hasn’t got a clue. (Focus group 6) c:

Although gender does not feature explicitly in this exchange, it is hard to overlook the possibility that the judgements being expressed were gendered (and that it was not just about commercial success). And other exchanges made this explicit: d: He

[Simon Cowell] is not like Louis Walsh and like ‘oooh’. ... like for the whole panel, he is the dominant masculine figure, like the girls are both very girly. a: Crying. d: Nice and crying, like, for good performances, and Louis Walsh is just Louis Walsh, and he [Cowell] is the only one who seems to talk any proper sense

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because he is like the dominant powerful, kind of masculine figure. (Focus group 8)

Whenever they questioned the expertise of Simon Cowell’s fellow judges, our respondents did not refer to specific evidence relating to the judges’ actual achievements as music entrepreneurs and artists. Instead, they described both Dannii Minogue and Cheryl Cole as ‘girls’, and highlighted their ‘girly’ display of emotions on the show. A focus on emotions is a common linguistic tool to deny power to women in the public sphere (Duncan and Messner 1998: 177). Put formally, our findings suggest that when judging the expertise and authority of female celebrities our respondents deployed a gendered concept of the public sphere which privileged ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (Connell 1983, 1995), centred around the theme of rationality and controlled emotions (Morgan 1993, 71–73). The performance of this particular masculinity in theory is open to both women and men (McInnes 1998, 45). Equally, failure to perform is a possibility for both. Men, too, may become feminised. The description of Louis Walsh by one of our respondents as being ‘so oooh’ (Focus group 8) suggested that our respondents considered male celebrities who did not adhere to the dominant concept of masculinity as less authoritative. What was important, too, was how these assessments carried across into the discussion of what was required of political leadership and representation. Both male and female respondents saw only limited opportunities for the performance of femininity in formal politics. A female respondent, for example, suggested that Cheryl Cole would not be taken seriously as Prime Minister because ‘men just like her because obviously she’s just good looking and attractive. And women like her for fashion and things like that’ (Interview 6). Many of the young people we spoke to were doubtful about whether the (post-feminist) identity of someone like Cole (a L’Oreal model) could be seen as an authoritative representation of public opinion. Our respondents did not reserve this scepticism for female celebrities only; they also applied similar criteria to elected politicians. As the following example illustrates, central to a credible performance as a politician, at least according to one male respondent, was a lack of feminity: No, it [pop star Kylie Minogue’s style] doesn’t fit politics at all. She’s like make-up girly girl; you don’t really see that, apart from that American politician

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i:

Sarah Palin? I think that’s stupid for her to be a politician. She was, like, that guy’s [John McCain] deputy president or whatever. I thought that was the most stupid thing I’ve ever seen. She was in a beauty contest, and now she’s a politician. It doesn’t fit. She looks a bit … she just looks out of place, there are all these men in suits and then there’s her all glammed up and trying to pull it off, and it looks fake to me. (Interview 21)

Across our focus groups and interviews respondents expressed doubt as to whether women could ‘pull off’ the performance of a politician. But while our respondents appear to judge women harshly, we would add an important qualification. When evaluating the chances of female celebrities in politics, our respondents assessed the extent to which they saw women fitting into the existing structures of power that govern politics, as they saw them, and what they saw was politics as performance. ‘Glammed up’ women like Sarah Palin were criticised, as we see above, not so much for their policies, but for looking ‘fake’ and ‘out of place’. Our respondents’ doubt about the leadership potential of female celebrities seemed to be rooted less in their attitude towards women in general, and more in their perception of politics as a form of performance in which masculine identities are needed to occupy the stage. It was this perception that informed their judgements. Hence, it was femininity, as well as youth and a lack of control over one’s emotions and mind, that were referred to as barriers to accessing the political system. In thinking like this, our respondents shared a more widespread prejudice – that female politicians are less well equipped to be leadership candidates. This prejudice was evident when the former Cabinet minister, Caroline Flint, allowed ‘model-style shots’ of herself to appear in the Observer Woman magazine. These pictures were said to have ‘reinforced’ Downing Street’s view of her as a weak politician (Watt 2009). Similarly, our respondents’ suggestion that successful entrepreneurs have privileged access to politics may result from their knowledge of the appointment of a businessman like Alan Sugar to the position of government adviser (BBC online, 5 June 2009; available at: www.news. bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8085254.stm). Conclusion Our respondents clearly do not see themselves as having privileged access to the world of politics. When describing themselves as people who cannot yet make a difference, and in their cynicism towards elected politicians, they echoed criticisms that have been raised by

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young people in the UK for years. The perceived failure of politicians to listen to and act upon young people’s concerns is one of the key reasons young people feel alienated from existing political structures (Electoral Commission 2003). Celebrities who pursue political causes that are close to their heart may offer an alternative to a system that our respondents distrust. Yet rather than challenging its hierarchies of power, they remain subjects of a discourse which privileges masculinity, maturity and business success. The potential of celebrity culture as a democratising force is not fully realised. Rather than calling for ‘make-up girly girls’ to take on roles of political leadership, our respondents tend to remain positioned within existing conventions about the character and operation of political power. Our findings reveal a tension within young citizens’ attitudes towards celebrity politics. On the one hand, young citizens responded positively to the general idea of celebrity politics because they saw it as an alternative to formal government. While they presented themselves as suspicious of politicians’ motives and alienated from the political process, they seemed willing to bestow an initial level of trust in celebrities’ political messages, a level of trust that was rarely, if ever, evident in discussion of traditional politicians. Our young citizens looked for some notion of ‘authentic politics’, and they used ‘character’, as constituted by a media persona, to identify authenticity and genuine commitment to a cause. Yet while they may be perceived as the more authentic political actors, not all celebrities in the eyes of our respondents are cut out for political leadership. Our findings suggest that young citizens in the UK are caught up in established discourses of authority and power, and rather than offering counter discourses, they accept the political norms from which they find themselves excluded. By making this argument we do not want to suggest that young citizens lack all agency. We certainly think that in their criticism of politicians and their celebration of (some) celebrities’ politics, our respondents occasionally expressed a sense of how in their eyes politics should be. Yet at the same time their assessment of how politics is showed their awareness of the strength and persistence of cultural norms that continue to put some social groups, including young members of society, at a disadvantage. Much of what they say is driven by an understanding of politics as performance. It is this that grounds, in part, the possibility of celebrity politics. It is this too that informs their judgement of those who seem to be capable of exercising power. This might be an argument for chal-

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lenging this underlying assumption; to insist that politics is not about performance, but about policy. This is certainly a route taken by those who worry about the ‘dumbing down’ of politics. But there is another possible response. This is to accept that, in an important part, politics is indeed an exercise in performance (Corner and Pels 2003). The issue then becomes as to what styles of performance are more appropriate or less appropriate. And it is this which our respondents are engaged with as they reflect upon the comparative virtues of The X Factor judges and the like. They are exercised about what kind of performance style befits a politician, as they understand that role. For those intent upon engaging young people in politics, therefore, there is work to be done on how they understand politics, not by insisting that they read political science books, but rather by extending the range of political performances to which they are witness. This is a task for art and culture as much as for political studies. It is here that we can engage with questions of whether or not women make good politicians, or whether politicians need to act like Simon Cowell. Implicit in much of the discussion about politicians and their role is an assumption about whom they are to represent. This is a matter of the communities of interests with which people identify. And just as popular culture provides a means of reflecting upon what it means to be a politician, and the continuities between this and the world of the celebrity, so popular culture plays a part in the constitution of these communities of interest and the identities associated with them. This latter process is the topic of the next chapter.

8

Altogether now: creating collective identities

Whenever we talked to our respondents about formal politics, it became clear very quickly that the majority did not feel they could speak with any authority on the subject. Only a few pronounced an interest in formal politics. The exception was the student who was, she said, a frequent attendee at party conferences (Interview 1). It was much more common to hear our respondents describe politics as ‘boring’, as something they could not really judge, or ‘give a crap about’. In contrast, it was clear that when it came to the topic of identity politics, our respondents did feel that they had the necessary authority and cultural capital to assert an opinion. Moreover, they proclaimed an interest in such politics. In Chapter 6, for example, we saw how our respondents were at times quite critical of the production values and processes of soap operas, but also of news. They were confident that news reporting was biased, and they compared the social realism of storylines in soap operas such as Hollyoaks and EastEnders. Unlike formal politics, identity politics was clearly something our respondents felt was ‘for them’. Central to our approach in this book is the argument that citizen engagement requires a connection with communities of interest. It is a precondition from which civic action follows. In this chapter we explore the potential of popular culture to create or represent the social ties that are an important dimension of citizen engagement. We suggest that, for our respondents, the potential to connect with others is one of the pleasures of popular culture. This connection was valued for the social interaction it offered, but it was not limited to it. Young people spoke of using popular culture to affirm their ties with family and friends, but also to establish connections with distant others and locating themselves within wider communities of interest. Popular culture, it seems, might be particularly well suited to engage young citizens in the politics of identity and everyday life. Unlike the world of formal politics, popular

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culture invites emotional engagement with politics and explores political issues which our respondents felt were of relevance to them. Spending time with family and friends Throughout our interviews and focus groups it became apparent that popular culture is something our respondents often enjoy together with others. As this extract from one of our focus groups illustrated, their own viewing habits were shaped by those of their family members: Do you not watch The X Factor? Not much. i: And what do you like about The X Factor? c: Well I don’t really like it, I just watch it because my mum watches it and loves it. a: Same actually. (Focus group 6) i:

f:

Not all television viewing was described as a ‘family affair’. However, counter to the fears of some media commentators in the UK and the US about the general and unstoppable decline of family television (e.g. Green 2011; ‘Penelope Keith’ 2011), we found that many of our respondents associated particular programmes with a shared family experience, a finding which chimes with that of a UK poll in which ‘one in ten said the pressures of work and home life meant that time watching the TV was their only chance to bond’. Over 50% of respondents regarded ‘sitting down together in front of the box as the best way of catching up’ (Sims 2009). Family members did not always share the same level of interest or sustained commitment to a programme. One respondent for example said that she only watches soap operas ‘when I’m in a room when like my mum is watching them’ (Focus group 2). Yet what such findings nevertheless indicate to us is that popular culture has a central role in family life. They also indicate that for our respondents popular culture is an important focal point for social interaction. It was not just television that was valued for its ability to provide opportunities of such interaction; video games were seen like this too. The following focus group may have disagreed over the quality of ­specific games and consoles. However, it agreed on the importance of interactivity and enjoying popular culture together as a group: e:

So I think in a game you need loads of stuff to keep it going.

d: That’s with all games really, if you can play your friends and stuff.

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f: Yeah,

it’s good because some games have one player and two player modes, rather than one player and it’s just – like – oh, I might as well play. d: Online is good these days. ... a: The 3D effects are so much more realistic. You look at this, and think look how this has progressed. I remember games like five years ago, then they were wicked. Now, look at these now, they are amazing. The Wii is just ... f: And the controllers are rubbish. b: It gets you up. f: I just want to sit down. d: Nintendo Wiis are great because it’s a family thing. f: No it’s not. d: You can sit down and it’s social and you can get the Wii out and have fun. It’s physical burning calories and running around and it does relate. I don’t think a lot of the games that are on Wii are on PS3. You can probably get Call of Duty on Wii. No it’s not. f: Why would you? d: It’s creative. (Focus group 5)

We were interested to see that interactivity was an important criterion even for those respondents who said they enjoyed violent shooter games, precisely the kind of game that critics of gaming culture are concerned about: I like Call of Duty, that’s pretty good, play online and just kill everyone. i: Tell me what’s the difference between playing online and playing on your own? Interact with people, probably make new friends or whatever, like you can make clans and get people to join your team. i: How does the game change? If you start playing in a clan or whatever, then you have to think about what these other people are doing? Yeah, in a sense, because you’re working together as a team, whereas before you can just kill. (Interview 17)

Gaming in the past has been described by some as an activity which isolates an individual from their peer group (Selnow 1984). Our findings are more in line with those who have suggested that rather than creating social alienation and isolation, gaming can increase social interaction with family and friends (Mitchell 1985; Colwell et al. 1995). The following respondent found that gaming had increased such opportunities for him. Online gaming creates opportunities for him to make new friends. His experience also suggests that these friendships were not necessarily limited to the online world, but spilled over and into the offline world:

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I play quite often, like, most nights I’d say each night for about one hour, two hours, I normally play either Halo, or Fifa is the other one. And how I met him was we were just like setting up a team, me and my friend, in – like – real life friend. We were setting up a team to like compete and we were looking for some people, and we just joined a random game and it matched us up with this guy, and we started playing and he turned out to be a really alright guy so we kind of invited him in and he had a few friends and we got to know them, got to know them, and when, because they obviously support Derby and we support Norwich, when our football teams met up in the league, we went up there to Derby and then they came down here. (Interview 4)

There is undoubtedly a trend towards increased individualised media lifestyles. Cheaper media hardware and software allows an increasingly personalised media environment. For young people, a television, sound system, or games console may be a central part of their ‘bedroom culture’ which helps them create a space of uninterrupted privacy within the family home (Bovill and Livingstone 2001; Livingstone 2007). Yet we would also agree with those who suggest that ‘this trend towards more individualised access goes along with ... collective uses that appear to be still very significant’ (Pasquier et al. 1998: 503). Popular culture is enjoyed together with family (ibid.), but also with friends. Social ties and talk about popular culture One of the pleasures of popular culture, for our respondents, is partly the opportunity it offers for spending time with others. Another pleasure is that it is a topic of conversation. Similar to their counterparts in other European countries (e.g. Suess et al. 1998), our respondents indicated that it is not uncommon for them to discuss at school the storylines and characters featured in programmes broadcast the night before: c:

Me and Zack said it earlier, ‘did you see Top Gear on Sunday?’ ‘Yeah, it was rubbish.’ He says, ‘yeah, it was pathetic.’ (Focus group 12)

We met several young people who suggested that, unlike their classmates, they did not watch a particular programme. However, these young people, who seemingly bucked a cultural trend, were nevertheless able to participate in our focus group discussions about the very same programme, often because one of their family members watched the programme: c:

Simon Cowell is the best.

d: He’s just honest.

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f:

As soon as Simon Cowell came about ... You don’t watch this! f: But I know what he’s about because both my sisters watch this. (Focus group 5) i:

Others explained how they would discuss their musical tastes with their siblings and be introduced by them to music that they had not appreciated before: d: I

don’t know, my little brother is into all, like, guitar stuff, and plays the guitar. And whenever we, like, all sit and watch the television together, and we are on the music channels, I want to put on MTV and all stuff like that, and he’ll put on Scuz, I think it is. ... And I’m, like, what is this? And then he’ll be, like, no, listen to this, it’s actually quite good, and I don’t know, we’ll have conversations about the kind of music he likes and the kind of music I like, and we get a different feel of each other’s. I don’t know, I think you can talk to people who don’t like the same music as you, about that music and just, like, compare. (Focus group 12)

Similarly, and this is certainly a point made by several of the young men we spoke to, video games are a topic of conversation for our respondents: a: It is the basis of every conversation. They have Call of Duty. b:

Every day. Is that true? Boys: Yeah. i: So what do you talk about? b: That I’m in the top thousand in the world. i: Really? Which game? b: Call of Duty. (Focus group 3) i:

There is, of course, much evidence from previous research to suggest that gaming is a gendered activity. Not only do many games privilege white heterosexual masculinity through game characters and narratives (Dietz 1998; Beasley and Collins Stanley 2002; Ivory 2006), but women often find themselves marginalised from the practice of gaming itself (Ogletree and Drake 2007). Some of our respondents indicated that they too had observed this gender divide. One referred to video games as an example of ‘typical boys’ stuff’ (Interview 4). Another suggested that ‘girls don’t really like shooting and stuff, so they go for like the cuddly animals, fluffy bunny rabbit games’ (Focus group 6). Moreover, there was a sense among some respondents that when young women do join in when their male friends play shooter games, they might not partici-

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pate fully in the game, but restrict their participation to chatting and flirting, as this (female) respondent told us of her experience: b: I

was round at R---’s once and he has a headset, one Friday night, and I think you were on the other end. And I got on it but I didn’t play it. I was just talking. They were all just on it and I could hear everyone talking, it was just funny. Because it was everyone we knew. i: So is it a really sharp gender divide? all: Yeah. a: Especially with the games we play. b: But if you are a girl playing that, then you just have all the boys talking to you. a: You don’t have to talk. b: But if there is a list of one hundred million boys and there’s one girl there, all the boys will be talking to her. (Focus group 3)

Our respondents, like the young people in this focus group, did indicate that there may be a gender divide when it comes to the types of games they enjoy or the intensity with which they might want to engage in conversations about games. Such examples still suggest that young women nevertheless participate in the culture of gaming and use it as a tool for social interaction. Even though these women may not have played the game for its own sake, by being online and ‘just talking’, they were part of the community of friends. What these examples illustrate is that popular culture is central to our respondents’ everyday lives. They show that they value the opportunity they present for spending time with family and friends, and providing topics of conversation. What these examples have not yet demonstrated is how popular culture might help our respondents connect with wider communities of interest. Beyond family and friends: imagined communities of belonging Just because someone watches The X Factor with their sisters (who happen to like the programme) does not mean that they automatically connect with the interests of a wider social group. As we have argued in Chapter 3, in order for The X Factor to provide a resource for citizen engagement, the programme would have to spark a conversation or thought process that relates to an issue that is of concern to a wider social group. It would have to help conceptualise a sense of self in relation to unknown others. Our respondents would have to become aware of how strangers have experiences and interests which are very similar to their own, or they might learn of an issue which is not central to their

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own private lives, but which they then come to perceive as one that other members of the public, including themselves, ought to know and care about. In Chapter 3, we pointed out that citizen engagement is not exclusively motivated by experiences from one’s immediate personal context. A politically engaged person overcomes geographical, cultural and social distance through the recognition of shared concerns. The role of popular culture thus is to construct a sense of community, allowing individuals to ‘develop political commonality from their political individuality’ (Bang 2009: 121). In our study we looked for examples when our young people either explicitly or implicitly connected the pleasures (and displeasures) of popular culture to a range of collectivities, including the regional, national and the global. The survey we conducted at the start of our research indicated that much of the popular culture our respondents consumed derived from the US. Television programmes such as Friends or Family Guy, and music by Kanye West were popular with many. When these were referred to as examples by focus group participants, others readily responded and demonstrated familiarity with these programmes or artists, even if they themselves did not seem to like them all that much. Yet US culture was not the only or dominant source of culture. British television, such as the soap opera Hollyoaks, but also British entertainers and comedians, such as radio DJ Chris Moyles, were appreciated by many. Video games, a number of which were Japanese imports, were the exception to this largely British and American diet of popular culture. These findings might invite the conclusion that our respondents have little opportunity to connect with a sense of regional identity. Yet it does not require programmes about a region for an audience to explore a regional sense of self. Our respondents did not suggest to us that they are in the habit of seeking out popular culture that represents their region, but they certainly did indicate that they appreciated moments when popular culture invited them to feel part of their regional community. Such moments included local news (Focus group 13), but also examples when someone from their region appears on national television, as this conversation about television talent shows illustrates: b:

And everyone goes on the fact of where that person comes from. If you get someone from Newcastle, like, if someone was from Norwich, and even if I didn’t know them, I probably would vote for them just because it would be great. a: Just because they are from Norwich. i: Would you? Why?

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d: They’re from Norwich. b: Just

because they are from Norwich, I mean, why not? If they won, we would end up holding. It’s nothing like about pride of Norwich, it’s just the fact that they are from Norwich. Like everyone was fascinated by that one of Big Brother, what was his name? Craig? Just because he was from Sheringham. (Focus group 6)

Across our focus groups and interviews it became apparent that as they explored concepts of collective identity and belonging, most of our respondents worked with a fairly traditional mapping of the world, where national and regional cultures offer the strongest points of identification. Yet there were exceptions. Some of our respondents expressed an interest in Asian music (Focus group 4), others appreciated French hip hop (Interview 13). Several of these respondents had roots in immigrant cultures. For some, leaving their country of origin and moving to the UK was something they themselves had experienced. For others, their diasporic sense of self was rooted in their family’s history. The following extract from one of our interviews illustrates what all of these respondents seemed to have in common. Music was a means of establishing or maintaining their connection with another culture. In particular, they appreciated opportunities to listen to artists singing in a language or accent other than those that dominated the areas in which they lived. These respondents also valued listening to songs that addressed themes that were rooted in non-British cultural contexts: I’m Nigerian as well, I was born in Nigeria. And when I came to America, there’s not that many Nigerians when you compare it to here. England is so multicultural so I really got in touch with my culture here, and it was definitely through music, and it was just through listening … because in Nigeria, they’ve got this kind of Nigerian hip hop, R’n B type thing, this genre, and it’s so cool because you identify with things at home, not America, but ‘home home’. But it’s in a way that you’re used to, type thing. There’s this song, and it has to do with food, Nigerian food, and the way they speak, the accents they use, everything is Nigerian, but the way it’s brought, its R’n’B beat; and you can just tell it’s got all the conventions of R’n’B, but what they’re talking about is us, it’s just where we’re from. I love it. And Nollywood as well, that’s another thing, Nollywood irritates the living daylights out of me. (Interview 10)

For these young people popular culture, and music in particular, was a way to strengthen one aspect of who they think they are. Work on diasporic identities and culture describes how cultural consumption

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may be a way for diasporic groups to express and rebel against their experience of marginalisation in their country of residence (Miladi 2006). Popular culture evidently can be a vehicle for political commentary and thus political engagement. Kaya (2002), for example, describes how hip hop enables Turkish-German citizens to explore the experience of discrimination. Our respondents did not indicate that they used music to make overtly political statements. In the same way, those who said they enjoyed opportunities to see residents from their region on television did not then go on to make a political statement about this geographic area and its people. The last few examples do, however, illustrate how popular culture helps people to connect to communities and to feel part of a culture. These feelings may be somewhat vaguely defined, a combination of positive, emotional associations and a sense of some of the shared cultural practices of the community in question. Yet, as we suggested in Chapter 3, such connections and feelings of belonging are central preconditions for political engagement. Affinity, even if it is vaguely defined, is an important motivating factor for citizenship. In our conversations with them, several of our respondents moved from a sense of affinity and pride in ‘their’ community of interest to explore questions of value and the distribution of power. Identifying with communities of interest: affinity and values While we did come across more vaguely defined expressions of regional belonging, we also heard respondents describe what they clearly consider to be key characteristics of their region, and how they located their sense of self in relation to the rest of the UK. These young people sought to dispel the myth of East Anglia as a region dominated by farming and wide, empty landscapes. As one respondent put it, East Anglia is a place where people ‘actually live’: i:

What about music, does music ever say anything or have anything local? It depends. UEA [University of East Anglia] does lots of concerts and stuff and that kind of influences with the area, because some bands always come back every year because they enjoy it so much. And I’ve heard, like, The Rumble Strips, they said on a TV programme that their best show was in Norwich. i: And does that …? That makes me kind of think of this area, that we have good crowds. i: It makes you feel something about Norwich and Norfolk? Do you have any other examples?

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There was like a TV thing looking for bands. It was like Orange Unsigned, and there was like a band from Ipswich and that was quite cool that they were from Ipswich. ... i: Can you try and explain why that’s important? It kind of broadens people’s, like [pause] most people all they see East Anglia as a place to go on holiday, but people actually live here. (Interview 24)

Local news and national television programmes give these respondents reassurance of their regional existence and its qualities. It became clear, however, that they did not just accept any representation of their region as valid or desirable. Young people wanted to put their own experiences and cultural pleasures on the map, and to make them central to how the rest of the country comes to understand them. To us, this suggests that popular culture may be a resource that young people can use to connect with issues of regional concern. It also suggests that concepts of the region in popular culture might stimulate conversations in which young people explore not only the question of what their region stands for, but also the relationships of economic and political power that exist between regions. This engagement with issues of equality across a nation-state may be very tentative. Respondents who talked about the image their region had within the UK did not explicitly reflect on Britain’s tradition of centralised rather than federal government. What they did do, however, was to reflect on issues that concerned not only themselves, but a wider collectivity. They showed an awareness of the relationships of power that exist within the UK, and a proto-political interest in wanting to see these relationships re-balanced. This is not enough evidence to suggest that our respondents want to engage in formal politics. It is, however, evidence to suggest that our respondents are anything but apolitical and that conversations about popular culture can reveal their exploration of political issues. Explorations of cultural values and traditions emerged clearly in particular whenever conversation turned to the topic of British and American culture. Many of our respondents expressed a sense of pride in British popular culture. British television, but also British television audiences, were praised by many and favourably compared to their US counterparts. British sitcoms, in particular, were regarded by many as superior. As one respondent put it, ‘when a British sitcom comes out, you immediately realise it is a more intelligent comedy’ (Focus group 2). Conversations like this suggested to us that certainly some of our respondents had a sense of what it meant to be British and what it meant to be American. Moreover, they clearly identified with

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‘Britishness’ and constructed the US and its people as inferior ‘others’. At times, their national pride seemed to get the better of them as they drew on somewhat crude stereotypes: I do like the America culture, but, as in their politicians, I really don’t like them. Especially their presidents, George Bush and Obama, from what I’ve read on the news and that, they’re just after oil, and then when I see on the news you have little poor kids lying on the street and stuff, from Iraq, I just think it’s unfair. ... Yeah, their culture and stuff is just another culture. They don’t treat anyone fair. I just believe that the way their politics are working, I’m not a fan of. (Interview 16)

One might argue that this is nothing but a simplistic, even a jingoistic statement. Yet as we have argued earlier, we do not wish to make a value judgement between democratic and lesser democratic forms of political engagement. Having a sense of pride in a nation – however conceived – is something that might motivate political engagement. Moreover, as the theme of American versus British culture emerged across our focus groups and interviews, it became apparent that when our respondents made value judgements about British and American television, they were also expressing a sense of difference of another kind, one that might be classified as political. Our respondents’ aesthetic judgements, but also their prejudices, were part of more complex comments about television production and audience expectations. As the following example demonstrates, respondents associated policies of regulation and funding with quality: Oh yeah, I think I probably would trust the BBC a bit more because, you know, it is paid for by the people for the people … I would trust the BBC more [than US television]. (Interview 23)

Such comments about the quality that can be expected from a more regulated television market chimed with others in which respondents suggested that British television audiences, unlike audiences in the US, are used to, and therefore demand, high quality programmes: The difference is that in America, people just watch stuff. So people can just churn out stuff, and people will still watch it. But in England, if you want to make a sitcom, then you actually have to have a decent proposal to do it. You can’t just go in and make one. (Focus group 7)

The view that British programmes in general were better than American programmes was not shared by all our respondents. Some felt

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that American programming is always better and more widely known than British programming (Focus group 5). Others suggested that American programmes display ‘better imagination’ (Focus group 2). However, even those respondents who came to the defence of American television suggested that there are national television cultures of production and distribution. Their argument goes beyond a simplistic reiteration of national stereotypes. When our respondents commented on the quality of national television programmes and their audiences, they made judgements about the cultural industries and their regulation and funding. Their statements might not always be fully developed and deeply sophisticated analyses of cultural policy, but they do represent a set of values for the communities they imagine and talk about. They identify television regulation as an issue of public concern. When they did so, they did not necessarily support the view that other communities deserve the same as the ones to which they feel closest. Popular culture: the all-powerful remedy against apathy? We think that our findings demonstrate the potential of popular culture to connect young people with public affairs. We were able to demonstrate this potential by working with wide concepts of politics and citizen engagement. Those writers who are more comfortable with a traditional and narrow approach might say that all we have done so far is demonstrate that popular culture is a resource young people can use to connect with any politics other than formal politics. They might, quite rightly, point out that even if we live in a world of ‘bricoleur politics’, governments still matter. Elections still matter. Party politics still matter. In Chapter 7, we discussed how our respondents would like to see alternatives to formal politics, to its dominant mode of communication and its marginalisation of issues that are important to young people. Our respondents clearly found it difficult to see what their role in formal politics might be. It could be argued that their perception of formal politics was not exclusively the fault of formal politics. It might also be that the representation of formal politics that they encounter in popular culture is to blame. When, for example, our respondents described what a successful politician might look like and how political authority is performed, they were in many ways describing key characteristics of government politics in parliament and in popular culture. Both formal politics and the representation of formal politics in popular culture, it seems to us, privilege masculine identity performances or suggest that masculine identity performances are what gets one’s voice

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heard. Members of Parliament who are not male or middle class have to work hard to convince themselves and others of their authority to legitimately represent the people (Liddle and Michielsens 2007). This is compounded by the way that news media frame politics in stereotypically masculine terms (Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ross 1996). There is certainly evidence that news media and gossip magazines reinforce existing gender assumptions in their portrayal of women politicians. Unlike families of male politicians, families from female politicians are portrayed as burdened so as to make the dual career impossible (Brown and Gardetto 2000; van Zoonen 2000). Evidence from research on cultural representations of youth also chimes with how our respondents assessed their chances of gaining authority and power to influence formal politics. For example, in his analysis of UK newspaper coverage of young anti-Iraq war protestors, Cushion (2007: 419) argues that, while the press sought to legitimise young people’s opinion before the war, the media frame shifted once the war had commenced, ‘with young protestors portrayed as opportunistic truants rather than (as pre-war) active, engaged citizens’. We do not want to suggest that these discourses of patriarchy and youth are sustained across all cultural forms and all texts. However, we need to recognise that the representations of political engagement and formal politics that are available in popular culture to a young person might make the prospect of political engagement seem rather daunting. Many of the young people we spoke to rated their own political efficacy as low, and suggested that politics simply was not for them. Therefore, when reflecting on the potential of popular culture to provide at least some of the resources young people need for political engagement, we should be careful not to overstate the power of music, video games and television to spark a young person’s interest and active engagement in formal politics. Popular culture is not an all powerful tool, guaranteed to engage a young person in politics. What it does offer, however, are opportunities to strengthen key dimensions of citizen identity and it should be taken seriously for that reason. We think that popular culture is particularly well suited to offer these opportunities as it sanctions modes of communication and collective interest which formal politics marginalises. Reflecting on debates about the tabloidisation and dumbing down of news, Temple (2006: 257) suggests that a ‘less elite-driven news agenda – one that recognises the importance of the emotional and the apparently trivial – offers wider opportunities for political engagement to all sections of society’. We would argue that not just ‘infotainment’,

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but a wide range of popular culture provides exactly that: not only are personal experiences and emotions sanctioned by the conventions of many genres, popular cultural texts often invite emotional reactions from those who encounter them. Popular culture legitimises and often celebrates ‘feminine’ forms of engagement which find little acceptance in formal politics. In Chapter 6 we discussed how our respondents talked about popular culture as ‘real’ and ‘authentic’. Many referred to the authenticity of popular culture to explain why it has an influence over their lives. Often, when assessing whether a cultural text is ‘authentic’ or ‘real’, they made their judgement dependent on the extent to which the meanings in a cultural text chimed with their own experiences and, crucially, their emotional response to these experiences. Music in particular, was credited with such authenticity and with the power to tap into personal emotional experiences. We met, for example, a respondent who said that ‘if you’re going through something you want to talk about, your problem and with songs you can just say, look what they’ve said, like it’s the same’ (Interview 14). While they were not always in agreement as to which cultural text was most successful at representing ‘real’ issues, our respondents were all very clear that cultural forms could represent issues that were of relevance to them personally, but also to their age group, as this conversation about Hollyoaks illustrates: a: There is not really, like, a mix of ages or anything [in Hollyoaks], so it is all, like, kids. And they portray them as being, like, really horrible. b: But that’s the point though. a: Yeah, but not all kids are like that. And I think they give it a really bad … b: Do you think? I don’t think it’s like that at all – it’s a really wide span of people. What was that Hannah, who had the whole eating disorder thing, and Amy who has got the domestic violence with Steve? c: And college is meant to be aimed at young people, and it’s not like it’s deliberately not having all different age groups from like uni students downwards. And I think it’s really good for people of our age to see things like the anorexia, drug use and teenage pregnancies. Basically everything. (Focus group 1)

Similarly, if we return to the conversations about the qualities of British and American comedies, and about regional culture on national television, we can see that our respondents use popular culture to locate themselves within wider communities of interest, communities which are not only defined by age, but also by geographic and cultural characteristics. Popular culture provides these opportunities for them. Moreover, it provides opportunities to engage with these c­ ommunities

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at an emotional level. Our respondents clearly indicated that they appreciated both. Conclusion In Chapter 5 we argued that the cultural texts that were popular with our respondents represent not only formal politics, but also identity politics. In this chapter, focusing on the concepts of regional and national identity, but also age, we have demonstrated that our respondents connected with such politics. They used encounters with popular culture to explore the values, interests and characteristics of these communities of interest, even as they also strengthen their ties with families and friends. Popular culture helped them maintain relationships in their private lives, and in a wider community, to locate their personal selves in a public context. Those who limit the markers of citizen engagement to such activities as volunteering, attending political rallies or discussing policy proposals of political parties, will not be convinced that any of the extracts we cited in this chapter are evidence of our respondents’ engagement as citizens. They might argue that all we have demonstrated is that our respondents seem to have slightly hazy, if positive, recollections of seeing references to their home region, nation or age group in popular culture. To those critics we would reply that yes, we did show that our respondents recalled such moments. We would, however, also say that such moments are important for citizen engagement. We do not claim that these moments are qualitatively the same kind of thing as going on a march or attending a rally. We argue that they are an important precondition for what some might think are the ‘grander’ gestures of citizen engagement. Our findings demonstrate that popular culture is a starting point from which our respondents tentatively explore questions of belonging and the values and concerns of their communities. While traditional approaches to citizen engagement might take issue with the notion that such tentative explorations of identity politics are of political relevance and importance, we would argue that the potential of popular culture as a resource for citizen engagement should be taken seriously precisely because it offers opportunities to explore identity politics in this way. When our respondents talked about formal politics and elected politicians, they said they would like to see alternatives. Our respondents want politicians to genuinely care and properly address issues that are of concern to young people. They would like to see politics performed in

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a way that is more playful and freed from the association of authority with maturity and masculinity. Popular culture offers a range of modes of presentation and does address issues our respondents care about. This does not mean that popular culture can or should be a substitute for other resources of citizen engagement. We do not argue that all a young person needs for citizen engagement is to watch reality television shows such as Britain’s Got Talent. What we do argue, however, is that such a programme can make a contribution to democratic culture precisely because its mode of presentation and its subject matter might connect young people to an issue of public concern. When they talked about the role of popular culture in their everyday lives, our respondents clearly indicated the importance they attach to feeling part of a community. Popular culture, already an established part of their everyday lives, makes available opportunities for them to make connections between their private lives and the wider world.

9

Playing with citizenship

So far we have represented our participants as a thoughtful bunch. When they reflected on the political efficacy of celebrities or the wider social significance of a storyline in, for example, a soap opera, they showed their ability to reflect critically on political issues, often doing so in a serious manner. In such moments, these young people came very close to the ‘ideal type citizen’ that we discussed in Chapter 3. They were calm and rational when formulating an opinion about political issues. Moreover, as they demonstrated in conversations about the conventions of cultural production, they assumed a position of critical distance from the meanings they had encountered in cultural texts. However, seriousness was not the only tone of conversation. There was a lot of giggling, and our respondents often laughed as they described the television programmes, songs or video games that they liked. Participants also described to us how they sometimes used popular culture to help them relax or to cheer themselves up. These are not the forms of engagement that one might typically associate with political ‘connectedness’ (Couldry et al., 2010). Indeed, they are precisely those that traditional approaches to citizenship and citizen engagement might deem as problematic. Young people who want to wind down and relax seem to say that there are moments when they do not want to stay alert to the injustices of the world and what to do about them. It seemed that our respondents might cherish moments of dis-connectedness. People have different motivations for using popular culture (Blumler and Katz 1974) and other studies have noted how such motivations include time consumption, information, escapism and entertainment (e.g. Rubin 1983; Vincent and Basil 1997), but also mood management, self-expression and enhancement of social connections, the last two being findings that have been associated with new media technolo-

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gies in particular (e.g. Shao 2009). Audiences do not always show the same depth of attentiveness when engaging with cultural texts and might even be indifferent (Hagen 1994). Our findings, which suggest that young people do not always seek an in-depth engagement with the meanings in a cultural text are not dissimilar to those found in other audience studies. We could therefore stop at this point and simply say that our finding of different levels of attentiveness and different forms of gratification echo those of previous research. We could just say that there are times when young people do not make use of the resources for citizen engagement that are available in popular culture. We think it is important to recognise that these moments of little or no political use exist. However, we are less certain about the extent to which moments of connectedness and moments of dis-connectedness are self-contained and discrete entities. The boundary between them can be blurred. A moment when the political potential of popular culture is not accessed might develop into one where it is. In this chapter we look at some of the pleasures our respondents described to us. We compare the pleasure of connecting with issues of public affairs, with pleasures of dancing and laughing. While the former sits comfortably with the idea of ‘public connectedness’, the latter appear to be the kinds of pleasures that traditional approaches to citizen engagement overlook or find problematic. Finally, we reflect on the pleasure of not having to think at all. In doing so, we want to caution against an approach to citizen engagement and popular culture that privileges cognitive over emotional or physical pleasures. There is political potential in the range of apparently nonpolitical pleasures of popular culture. We recognise that this leaves us open to the criticism of reading politics not only into every bit of popular culture, but also into everything young people do with it, regardless of whether they themselves saw what they did as political or not. Therefore, in this chapter we also want to reflect critically on the guiding principles that we sought to place at the heart of our research. We wanted to give young people a voice and to take seriously what they tell us about politics and popular culture. We also wanted to challenge an assumption that has characterised traditional approaches to citizen engagement for a long time, which was to say that cultural texts that are playful, that represent fictional or private worlds, and that engage audiences at an emotional level, are harmful to democratic culture. In the last five chapters we explored the potential of popular culture to connect with politics and aspects of citizenship. In this chapter we consider the limits to this

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­ otential. Sometimes popular culture is just good for dancing or relaxp ing. Sometimes all young people want from popular culture is distraction. But this does not lead automatically to the conclusion that popular culture is harmful or irrelevant. Acquiring knowledge: a pleasure of popular culture When we asked participants about their cultural likes and dislikes, many indicated that, for them, different forms of culture served different purposes. One of the distinctions they made when talking about television was between the programmes they watched to pass the time, and to stave off boredom, and those that they were ‘quite interested’ in: I suppose I just usually watch the typical teenager programmes, like the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. But there’s one programme that’s, like, based on reality; it’s called The Hills …. [it’s] about real life situations and stuff. I’m quite interested in that. Other than that, I’m not really too fussed about. i: When you mentioned The Hills, you said it was about real life situations. Is that a good thing for a television programme to deal with? You value the fact that it deals with real life situations? In that programme it helps you to understand how to solve your problems and stuff. i: Is it really practical, useful in that sense? Yeah. i: Whereas the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air doesn’t? That’s just a comedy programme. If I’m bored or something, I watch that. (Interview16)

Both the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, a sitcom featuring a young Will Smith, and The Hills, a reality television show which follows the lives of a group of young people in Los Angeles, are programmes that traditional approaches to the link between citizenship and popular culture are likely to find either irrelevant or harmful. The shows are designed for commercial purposes and one of their primary functions is to entertain. We would, nonetheless, argue that both programmes engage with political issues, in particular the politics of age and race. There are limitations to the way in which they address these political issues. Like the US sitcom the Cosby Show, the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air can be criticised for denying the realities of racial politics in the USA (Gates 1992; Lewis and Jhally 1992). However, this does not mean that audiences cannot or do not use these programmes to discuss and reflect on political issues. Our respondent, clearly derived pleasure from watching The Hills, a pleasure

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that lay, in part, in the show’s capacity to ‘help you understand how to solve your problems and stuff’. The pleasure of The Hills derived from the connection between his own personal life and the lives of television celebrities, as they were represented and ‘lived out’ on the television screen. Other respondents described the same kind of pleasure when they referred to storylines in soap operas as ‘life lessons’ (Focus group 1) and described lyrics in popular music as an opportunity for ‘learning’ (Interview 13). Respondents used similar phrases in their conversations about news, which one respondent associated with learning about ‘what’s going on’ (Focus group 13). Others referred to documentaries as ‘interesting’, and described how they enjoyed watching, for example, the former soap opera star Ross Kemp presenting a documentary about favelas in Latin America (Interview 23). Often the pleasure of ‘learning’ from popular culture was defined by the relevance of the programme or music to their personal lives. As one of them put it: ‘If a song relates to me I’ll listen’ (Interview 1). This is not an isolated pleasure, but a form of public connectedness. The pleasure of public connectedness does not derive simply from the relevance the song or programme has to their private lives. They may be thinking of their own experience, but what they say is also a statement about social relationships in a wider sense: i:

What artist or track, then, does speak to you and you might learn something from? There’s this song called ‘Gimme a call’ by Reilly. He’s saying how he should just have called the girl when he just left it for her to call. So sometimes you should call, you should make the first step. (Interview 24)

In conversations about television in particular, respondents stressed that they enjoyed programmes that featured characters of a similar age to them and issues that they recognised as being of relevance to their age group, such as teenage pregnancy or drug abuse. In doing so, they located their personal experience within a wider collective interest. Respondents also suggested that they enjoy finding out something new, and learning about political issues that shape the lives of culturally and geographically distant others: Yeah, Akon does a lot of good songs about that. And Kanye West. Some songs … Kanye West’s ‘Diamonds are Forever’, Akon’s ‘Ghetto’ … they’re just talking about how life is and poverty is, and how people are starving and we, us people, we’re living in a good society and we should make the most of it, and we should make the most of how we’re living and we should take

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this opportunity and take this chance to make the most in life, because other people don’t have the same chance as you. That’s what I feel, … when I listen to one of those songs, it just hits your heart really and it just makes you feel you’ve got to become something really, and make worth what you’ve got in your life. (Interview 13)

It was the pattern of responses like this across our focus groups and interviews that we used to support our argument that popular culture needs to be taken seriously as a resource young people can use to connect with political issues. Popular culture is a resource for political learning, and this is also a source of its pleasures. Having a laugh: embodied experiences of citizen engagement Traditional approaches to citizenship have privileged reason over emotion as a resource for citizen engagement. By privileging deliberative capacities, these approaches made the dualism of body and mind a key principle of citizenship. The capacity to control the passions of the body through the mind became a marker of the ideal citizen. This dualism of mind and body in citizenship theory is being increasingly challenged by writers who are interested in the emotions and subjectivities that structure, and possibly motivate, citizens (e.g. Marcus 2002; van Zoonen 2004; Gabrielson and Parady 2010). Our findings contribute to this debate. Across our focus groups and interviews it became clear that connecting with public issues is not a purely rational and detached process. The previous extract illustrates what we started to explore in Chapter 8, where we argued that popular culture provided young people with some of the resources they needed to connect at an emotional level with ‘imagined communities’ of interest. The pleasures of the music were linked to others’ experience of social inequality and its ability to ‘hit your heart’. In talking about this, our respondents also traced a connection between these pleasures and thought and knowledge. But, of course, popular culture is not always a source of earnest study. It makes people laugh and cry, and it is revealing to see how this plays into forms of public engagement. As one of our focus groups explained, an important quality in a television programme, a song or a game is whether it is funny: i:

Is that true, are you Friends fans?

c: Yeah. e:

It is so funny.

d: I barely watch it but when I do watch it, it is funny

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And what about that. Friends and real life, is there any connection?

b: No. a: And that’s why it is fun to watch as well. c:

Because it makes fun of the bad situation, so you can laugh at it instead of being depressed. i: But for you is it just a sequence of jokes? c: Yeah, and the characters are good. (Focus group 2)

Humour is a mode which eases the negotiation of socially unexpected, controversial or challenging moments and social structures. Joking can help to ease the embarrassment felt by someone who has ‘lost face’ after having involuntarily disrupted social order (Goffman 1967). Laughing at someone else’s faux pas can also be an expression of the pleasure one might experience when witnessing a challenge to social order. However, it can also be a form of ridicule which ‘ensures that the mechanism of embarrassment acquires and retains its power to enforce the demands of social order’ (Billig 2001: 38). Both ‘benign’ laughter and ridicule recognise the existence of the norms and hierarchies that govern people’s lives, and the appreciation of a situation or statement as funny relies on one’s ability to recognise the structures and norms of social order. In the exchange about Friends, our participants suggested that one of the reasons why they like the US sitcom was its humour: it ‘makes fun of the bad situation, so you can laugh at it instead of being depressed’. To say this is not to negate the problems or to escape them, but to recognise and explore them. Laughter is a physical reaction to a social experience. ‘Having a laugh’ can be an expression of citizenship. Popular culture allows for the exploration of socially acceptable behaviour. The limits of acceptability often came up in conversations about television talent shows like The X Factor. This was evident in talk about the treatment of members of the public by talent show judges and by audiences. Young people worried that the criticism was excessive and undeserved: i:

Do you all share this view that they [contestants on talent shows like X Factor] need to learn these life lessons? c: Yeah, maybe, they could just get a normal job or go into music how everyone else does. f: Yeah, but some of the stuff they don’t need to say, like you look like Vicky Pollard. That’s not nice, is it? c: Did someone actually say that? f: A few years ago. g: If you see the comments that some of the people put on their YouTube or their My Space, a lot of them are really horrible things.

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i:

And you are uncomfortable with the use of that as an opportunity to make fun of people? g: Well, no, but. Laughing (Focus group 8)

Conversations like this illustrate how popular culture can stimulate talk in which young people explore the limits of social acceptability. They are examples of how young people connect with issues of public concern, and how they use laughter to do so. Our participants were often themselves playful. Participants laughed together when recalling something they had seen on television or telling each other about a video game that they had played. Many giggled when talking about their cultural likes and dislikes. Such use of humour might be ‘merely’ an expression of a group bond. Our participants usually knew each other and many seemed to be friends. They shared memories of watching television or playing games together. Our reliance on focus groups of this kind was influenced by our desire to create a setting which would go some way to re-creating the friendly and relaxing atmosphere in which our participants might talk about popular culture. Their laughter was an expression of their familiarity with each other and an affirmation of their relationship. Yet it seems to us there is more to say about the role of humour in our participants’ conversations. In moments when they laughed about watching talent show contestants who humiliated themselves on national television, our participants’ reaction signalled their recognition of social norms, and the limits that those norms set. Television talent shows were not the only form of popular culture that stimulated humorous exchanges. In focus groups, we invited respondents to talk to us about their experience of playing violent video games, and about the pleasures of putting the characters into dangerous situations. An example we often used to introduce these conversations was The Sims, a game which allows players to control the characters in their various activities and relationships. For several of our respondents it seemed that the opportunity to cause characters to die in bizarre or violent ways was a pleasure afforded by the game. It was a source of fun. They laughed at their own or other participants’ recollections of times when they had killed one or more of the Sims: c:

It sounds really bad, but it’s really fun killing the Sims. Because, like, if you put them in a room with, like, a fireplace and take out the door then they can’t get out and the fire … Laughing (Focus group 2)

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This respondent clearly identified the ability to control, and even kill, characters in The Sims as one of the pleasures of the game. However, he signalled that this pleasure was at odds with what was acceptable in the real world. These moments of laughter and slightly embarrassed giggling echoed the findings of those who have argued that laughter facilitates the negotiation of social norms. The emotional pleasures represented, we would suggest, a proto-political moment. The importance of play Pleasure may be found in the trivial and the inconsequential, but this should not lead to the conclusion that all pleasures are trivial and inconsequential. Equally, political engagement is not only about campaigning for a cause or joining a party. Political engagement can take the form of talk, and, in particular, it takes the form of talk about popular culture. As we have argued, there are many points of political engagement offered by music, television and video games, and these can give rise to thoughts and feelings about identity and about power. Such talk may only qualify as proto-political, but this is no reason for discounting or ignoring it. In focusing on laughter, we have tried to show how this most basic of human reactions has just such a proto-political character. Going further, it might be suggested that the pleasure of laughter needs to be validated by knowledge of the world and the location of power within it. Soap operas, rap and shooter games provide for experiences and thoughts that help to form people’s identity as citizens. This extends from feelings of community to a sense of how the world works and how it should work. Were we too keen to interpret everything our respondents told us as the first tentative exploration of political issues, and signs of the protopolitical? Certainly we have been committed to taking seriously what young people have to say about popular culture. But in doing so, we have recognised that there are times when popular culture connects to the public realm, and others when it does not. We acknowledged that our respondents might at times actively choose not to be engaged citizens. This was evident when they told us that they liked ‘chill out music’ (Focus group 12), or soap operas because they are ‘light hearted’ (Focus group 12). Some said they used popular culture ‘to unwind and kind of relax’ (Focus group 9); others that they watched some television programmes when they are ‘bored and stuff’ (Interview 16). Again yet others described how they enjoyed singing and dancing along to popular music:

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a: Britney is just good anytime. i:

Why? Is she just entertaining?

a: Yeah, her songs are really catchy, though, and everyone knows the words

so, if you are with your friends and you stick it on, you can always sing along. (Interview 1)

Responses like this suggest that there are moments when music is very much an embodied experience with the rhythm and tune of a song being felt and acted out through the body. When our respondents told us how much they enjoyed singing or dancing along to a song, they did not tell us that they delighted in discussing its meaning. Rather, they described how they took pleasure in moments when they did not have to engage much with political issues at all, but could simply let the music tap into their emotions and find expression in dance. At times like this the emotional pleasures of popular culture overrode thoughts of deliberation and ‘learning’. An important pleasure offered by popular culture was not having to think much at all, to be able just to feel things. It was simply about having ‘a good time’, and this was all they looked for: the music I listen to sort of goes with the mood I’m in, because if I’m in a sort of down and angry mood then I might listen to heavy rock music, but if I’m in a happy mood, or if I’m just chilling, then I’ll just listen to a bit of reggae. (Interview 18)

Moreover, participants clearly sought to distinguish between songs that tapped into their emotions, those that had the potential to make them think and those that made them dance and not think at all: b: I

think it depends on what is going on in your life. … A lot of people relate to songs just because of their mood or what’s happened during the day. If they split up with someone then they hear a love song. c: A sad song. a: Like Aerosmith. b: Or like, … ‘so sick of love song’, like some people. It just depends what’s happened. d: Yeah, definitely. b: And I think your mood changes what you listen to. d: It annoys me that they affect me. c: I like a lot of music that like makes me move, because like I’m not the type of person who can sit still and I’ll be like doing this the whole way through this interview, but if there is something that I’ll like get up and dance to I’ll just literally get up and dance. i: And the lyrics, do they ever make you think?

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… c: I don’t know because I’m told a lot of stuff, so if I’m in – like – a really pensive mood I want to listen to something that makes me, that provokes thoughts and stuff, but then if I’m just like in the mood for moving around, then I listen to something different, something that’s really boppy. d: Yeah, like, who knows the words to something like ‘Disturbia’; stuff that, like, no one cares. Dance! b: It’s just a good beat. d: And then there’s some, like, more of the sadder songs. a: Like ‘Chasing’. b: Ah! That song drives me crazy. (Focus group 13)

Conversations like this suggest that, for our participants, there might be moments when they do not tap into any of the opportunities a cultural text might offer for citizen engagement. Indeed, our participants might at times willingly suspend critical thinking and find this a positive and pleasurable experience. If our young people did seek to make little or even no use of their capacity for critical thinking, does this make them disengaged? For those who worry about the effects of popular culture, then the thought that young people enjoy chilling out and dancing along to Britney Spears songs might be a concern. It is, in fact, never clear in what our respondents said whether they do ever entirely suspend their capacity for critical thinking. Certainly, we want to be cautious about treating the pleasures they take in singing along to Britney Spears songs as evidence that they are so immersed in popular culture that they suspend awareness of the world around them. Equally, we would not want to claim that such moments are the embodiment of the engaged citizen. What we do not want to suggest, however, is that play is irrelevant or unconnected with forms of citizen engagement. Citizens at play Play theory helps us make sense of this question of what happens at moments of cultural immersion. According to those who study it, play is ‘relatively self-contained’ and allows ‘people to experience a sense of completion within the space-time frame of the activity itself’ (Henricks, 2006: 89). A player of a shooter game, as the following example suggests, thus might find herself absorbed within the pleasures of the game,

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but this does not mean a loss of awareness, not least for the rules that govern the game itself: i:

What do you like about GTA [Grand Theft Auto] then?

a: I guess there is so much to do on it you don’t get bored of it. Because if you

don’t want to do a mission you don’t have to, and you can just, like – I know it doesn’t sound good – but you can just go and steal cars and kill people. Laughing i: And that’s the real pleasure isn’t it – it’s the killing feeling? a: It’s quite fun though sometimes, and it is more realistic now as well. Laughing a: This doesn’t sound very nice but if you shoot someone you get blood on the screen and it’s quite like. i: And do you feel you can shoot policemen too? And when you’re playing do you make any discrimination between shooting a policeman and someone else? a: No, because if you do that then you can get their cars and you can get all the army after you … and it’s quite fun, because of their life force. That is what I tend to do but it is quite good. (Focus group 1)

Part of the ‘fun’ of Grand Theft Auto was playing within, but also against, the rules of the game. At first glance, her description of play might seem highly individualised and unconnected to the social world. Again, this fits with how others understand such play: ‘Players affirm that they are willing to live inside the boundaries of events and, as part of that process, to acknowledge only the present’ (Henricks 2006: 194). Yet an important dimension of the play is the orientation of individuals towards the conditions of their existence (Henricks 2006: 184). Through play it becomes possible to explore options, to discover what Pat Kane might call the imagining and simulation of possible futures (Kane 2004, 2006). Play is an opportunity ‘to try out the implications of cultural and social possibilities without enduring consequences of reproach’ (Henricks 2006: 219). Play thus involves a degree of self- and social awareness on behalf of the player. Our respondent seemed to be describing just this when she talked about how, ‘if you don’t want to do a mission, you don’t have to, and you can just, like … go and steal cars and kill people’. Play theory also reminds us that those who play are conscious that they are at play. Players acknowledge their willingness to participate, sometimes by putting on socially recognised ‘play faces’ and using props, such as costumes. They equally signal when they want to stop playing (Henricks 2006: 189). This is what our respondents tell us when they distinguish between different types of culture by reference to the purposes they serve. Some television programmes and songs are

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good for relaxing and laughing. Others are good for connecting with issues of public affairs. But does any of this involve socially engaged thought? We may be able to convince the sceptics that young people remain self-aware and conscious of the social world around them when they playfully test its rules. But these sceptics might reasonably suggest that, if we believe in the principles of deliberative democracy, we surely need to make a distinction between someone who giggles at simulations of splattered blood and someone who discusses government policy. Of course, critical thinking is important, and giggling not enough. But citizen engagement does not require the absence of play. Furthermore, in making the connection between pleasure and politics, we need to be sensitive to the prejudices and judgements that surround such a connection. Critical thinking is associated with rationality, which in turn tends to be associated with a serious mode and an engagement with ‘real’ issues. Because it does not seem consequential or purposive, the importance and value of play are often dismissed. Consequently, cultural texts that use a comedic mode or do not use culturally (or professionally) agreed conventions of how to present the ‘real’ are likely to be discounted as being of no value to democratic culture and nothing more than ‘mere entertainment’. Moreover, those who take much pleasure in playful forms of culture are required to defend and legitimise their cultural tastes. Our respondents were acutely aware that to like some forms of popular culture puts you at risk of ridicule, or at least of not being taken seriously. Some of our respondents felt they had to somehow position themselves in relation to this culturally pervasive discourse of cultural distinction. They described some of their cultural tastes as ‘rubbish’ (Interview 18) and demonstrated awareness of the cultural importance that is attached to news and other types of factual programming. Comedies were often dismissed as being ‘just’ that: comedies (Interview 16). As we saw in Chapter 8, our respondents were conscious of the relative status of different types of response to culture, and to the way in which authority was assigned to some voices and not others. We did see some challenges to these cultural hierarchies. In one of our interviews, one young person insisted that television dramas like Skins or Shameless, and comedies like the Inbetweeners, mattered to her and that the pleasures she derived from watching them were to be taken seriously. Yet at the same time, she identified what she saw as a wider cultural disregard for playful programmes:

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a: No,

I don’t mean they’re rubbish, I mean, probably a lot of people take them like they are not really realistic programmes, they’re more for comedy value, than actually realistic things that actually go on. i: And would you agree with people who think that? a: In some respects, things like Shameless and Inbetweeners are a bit sort of over the top, exaggerating things that do happen, but, and the same with Skins really, some of the stuff really does go on and some of the stuff on it is a bit over exaggerated. Like in the end of the last series when they had a huge riot in the school, and they were just mucking around with all the fire extinguishers and things and all the teachers just standing there. It’s a bit unrealistic really … i: But you liked it. Yeah? a: Yeah, it was quite funny. (Interview 9)

This exchange clearly shows the tension between the sense that entertainment is serious, whilst also acknowledging the social attitudes that deny this claim. When they were discussing sci-fi dramas such as Heroes and Dr Who, our respondents showed that critical thinking can be stimulated by cultural texts that do not make claims to the real. When they talked about the pleasures of video games they gave examples of how play allowed a testing of social boundaries. Yet when they reflected on the cultural status of the songs, television programmes and video games they liked and the pleasures they derived from them, they were not always ready to overthrow the cultural hierarchy that marginalises their cultural tastes and the modes of engagement that they allow. Conclusion In this chapter we have mounted a challenge to those who insist that serious engagement can only take the form of rational thought, and who discount the emotional realm. One reason for regarding this categorisation as problematic is that it reinforces a cultural hierarchy that assumes that citizen engagement can only be demonstrated in a very limited number of ways. Moreover, these categories, if they are understood as discrete from each other, do not help us capture the pleasure our respondents derive from popular culture. For the young people we spoke to popular culture offered pleasures of body and mind. Many of the experiences they described were examples of play. While their thoughts might be very much caught up in the moment of play, our respondents nevertheless used it to explore the normative boundaries of their community.

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We used the concept of play to suggest that, for our respondents, there are times when they do not want to actively seek out connections with public issues. There are moments when our respondents want to switch off and relax, or just muck about. Using play theory allowed us, we hope, to recognise the importance that such moments have for our respondents, while at the same time batting away the suggestion that public connectedness can only be performed in a serious mode. Readers who followed our dance around the concept of critical thinking might say that using the concept of play did not in the end allow us to completely dismantle the binary opposites of good/bad popular culture and rational/emotional engagement. They might say that we have not gone far enough, and that we should argue that play strengthens engagement. Jane Bennett, for example, suggests that during encounters with popular culture, and she includes in her definition forms of culture that are produced for a commercial mass market, people are transported into moments where all thought is suspended. She describes such moments as states of enchantment. They consist of ‘a mixed bodily state of joy and disturbance, a transitory sensuous condition dense and intense enough to stop you in your tracks and toss you onto new terrain and to move you from the actual world to its virtual possibilities’ (Bennett 2001: 111). Bennett argues that such seemingly small and trivial things, such as the colours and movement in an advert, might induce a feeling of being ‘connected in an affirmative way to existence’, a sense of fullness that gives us a reminder ‘that it is good to be alive’ (Bennett 2001: 156). These moments of intense emotional experience are key to energising ethical commitments to others. Bennett does not offer much guidance as to how this model might be applied in empirical research, and given our reluctance to let go of the idea that engagement with popular culture involves self-awareness, it may be no surprise to find that we too are wary of applying this model to our research. Yet we take it as a challenge for future research to ask whether there is more than ‘just’ the pleasures of emotions and thought to be had from engagement with popular culture. Moreover, what we think Bennett’s work does show is that research on citizen engagement needs to challenge the assumption that the resources for such engagement can only be acquired through processes and experiences that involve rational thought. Destabilising the hierarchical distinction between good and bad forms of culture and modes of citizen engagement opens up new approaches to the relationship between politics and popular culture. Throughout our research we met participants who expressed a sense

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of being marginalised from formal politics. They also expressed a sense that their cultural tastes and modes of communication are not accorded status or authority. It seems to us that if we allow for a broader, more diverse sense of what it means to be an engaged citizen, and what it takes to have the authority to offer opinions about political issues, young people might be more inclined to see that politics is ‘for them’.

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We began this research, as we explained in the Introduction, because we wanted to explore a question that we felt had been neglected. When and how does popular culture contribute to citizenship? As we noted, much has been written and said about the part played by news and current affairs media in political engagement, but much less about the contribution made by entertainment. It is true that research has moved beyond the stand-off between those who see all forms of popular entertainment as harmful to citizenship, and those who see it as an unalloyed benefit. But it has not, as yet, established a detailed understanding of the relationship, at least not of a qualitative kind. We hope that in the preceding pages we have made some contribution to this. In what follows, we want to take up the implications of our research. Like others who have benefited from public funding, we are increasingly required to account for how it is used. In this spirit, we give an indication, for different constituencies, of the possible consequences of our arguments and our findings. With our research we hope to inform the work of four sets of academic and non-academic users: researchers with an interest in the role of popular culture for citizen engagement, schools, politicians, and the producers of popular culture. We begin with the academic community. Researching popular culture Our contribution to existing research on popular culture and citizenship is threefold. Firstly, to understand the ways in which young people engage with politics, popular culture needs to be taken seriously as an object of study. Much has been said and continues to be said about the role news media can play in politically engaging or, as the case might be, disengaging, citizens. Much more needs to and can be said about the

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role other genres and cultural forms can play. We are, we think, in good company here. Writers like Liesbet van Zoonen, Stephen Coleman, Jeffrey Jones, Joke Hermes and Cindy Stello have all demonstrated that news media are not the only resource for citizen engagement. We also need to look at, for example, satirical talk shows, soap operas, video games and popular music, because these forms of culture are central to citizens’ everyday lives, not just as sources of entertainment and escape, but as knowledge and understanding, identity and affect. Our second contribution to this field is to say that we need to start comparing different cultural genres and forms, and to tease out what it is about a particular text that might be linked to citizenship. We compared television, popular music and video games. While these cultural forms do not represent the whole repertoire of our respondents’ cultural likes, they nevertheless allow a comparative perspective. The idea of moving away from a focus on news genres and analysing a sample that might be a more accurate reflection of young people’s cultural likes is of course easier to develop at theoretical level than it is to realise in practice. The young people who participated in our study were fickle cultural omnivores. Their cultural preferences were diverse and fast changing. For us, as researchers, this meant that we could not identify a genre or a text of which we could say with confidence that it was central to the everyday lives and likes of young people in the UK today. We could only identify patterns of cultural likes and dislikes in the very broadest sense. What this analysis did allow us to do, however, is to show that there are several points of engagement in a cultural text, which all have the potential to connect a young person to political issues. We ranged from politics in the traditional sense of the word, to the politics of identity, and on to the politics of ethics and emotions. We discussed the explicitly political and the proto-political. We argued that a young person can connect with politics at a rational, deliberative level, but also at the level of emotions. We also suggested that there are differences in the ways in which media forms engage the audience in the creation of meaning. We cannot assume that one cultural text is like any other. This was particularly revealed in our comparison of television and popular music. Our respondents were at times quite cynical about the extent to which television genres such as soap operas have anything to say about the ‘real world’. In contrast, they talked about popular music as a cultural form that more easily taps into their emotions, reminds them of their own personal experiences and ‘hits their heart’, as one of our respondents said. Our research was a first attempt at comparing different cultural forms

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and exploring whether such a comparison might produce insights that are of relevance to the discussion of citizen engagement. Further research needs to be done to understand more comprehensively what it is about, for example, popular music and specific songs that hits the heart more than, say, a soap opera. Our third contribution to current debates about citizenship and popular culture is to say that research needs to take more seriously the role of emotions and pleasure for citizen engagement. We suggested that ‘being a citizen’ means having a sense of one’s place in the world and a sense of one’s relationship with sources of power and groups of interest. We think that there is more than one way of making these connections. Being a citizen can mean encountering and then calmly and rationally evaluating factual information. This is the cognitive and evaluative dimension of citizenship. Being a citizen can also mean having a sense of belonging to wider collective interests. It can mean having a sense of shared interests and shared values. This is the affinitive dimension of citizenship. It is possible to imagine that all these dimensions, the cognitive and evaluative, but also the affinitive, are experienced and expressed in a purely rational and distanced manner. Indeed we would argue that, traditionally at least, literature on citizenship and political engagement has preferred to imagine citizenship in this way. In this study we argue that being a citizen can mean being a rational thinker and cool ‘assessor’ of factual information. However, we think that there is more to citizenship than this. Being a citizen can also mean feeling close to others on an emotional level. Citizen engagement can be motivated by feelings of love, but also anger and hate. This is the affective dimension of citizenship. We do not think that emotions get in the way of political engagement. They are an important dimension of what it means to be a citizen. Popular culture connects young people at an emotional level with communities of interest. It is often because they care about others that our respondents invest in discussions about collective values and relations of power. We found that popular culture offers not only cognitive and evaluative, but affinitive and affective points of engagement. Making such connections is, of course, not the only pleasure young people derive from popular culture. It is important not to forget that popular culture is also about fun and challenging cultural conventions and expectations. Young people are not always the serious, deeply caring and reflective ideal citizens of political mythology. Popular culture in many ways allows young people to rebel against this ideal. Popular culture also offers fun and distraction. Yet this does not mean that the

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element of fun in popular culture somehow threatens the ‘serious’ contribution it can make to citizen engagement. The two are connected, and we think that our respondents clearly demonstrated that young people are in no danger of getting lost in the fun and distraction that popular culture offers. Our respondents were engaged young people. Just because they sometimes want to jump around to a Britney Spears song does not mean that popular culture forms a barrier to their ability to engage in politics. Citizenship education and media and cultural studies in schools The young people we spoke to professed little interest in formal politics; indeed, they felt marginalised from a world that did not welcome their interests or modes of communication. They felt that masculinity and maturity were essential to the realisation of political authority. They indicated that people with considerable success in business might be able to get their voices heard, but were not optimistic about their own chances to be listened to. They suggested that politicians do not genuinely care about the issues that concern teenagers in their everyday lives. In this sense, we suspect our respondents showed a fairly accurate understanding of the social structures that govern British politics today. It is here that we think citizenship education can make a difference to how young people perceive their chances of contributing and maybe even changing the world of formal politics. At the time of writing, the future of citizenship education in the UK is uncertain. As part of a national curriculum review, the British government is considering whether citizenship should remain statutory for high school students. We think that citizenship studies ought to remain a central element of the national curriculum. It is crucial that young people have a sense of their place in the world, and have an opportunity to explore the values that govern the relationship between members of society, and the institutions of government and state that influence their everyday lives. Moreover, it is important for them to discuss and learn more about their own political efficacy. It seems to us that young people need more confidence in their own ability to make their voices heard and to impact on government politics. They need to be inspired and recognise that politics is for them. They also need to feel they have the resources it takes to make governments listen. Moreover, they need to feel entitled to do so and should not be intimidated by a culture that privileges masculinity, maturity and capitalist success. Citizenship studies can help to inspire young people with confidence and provide

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them with the necessary resources they need to make a difference. We are not the first to say this (see, for example, the Economic and Social Research Council’s ‘Youth, Citizenship and Social Change’ programme from 2002), and we will not be the last. Citizenship education may be even more necessary now than it was when we started our research. A couple of years after we carried out our fieldwork, the UK saw several examples of young people trying to make their voices heard. In 2010 students organised mass protests over tuition fees and young people were among the protesters who, inspired by Occupy Wall Street, set up camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral in London, to show their anger at bankers and politicians over the global economic crisis. We would be inclined to agree with those who, observing the protests over fees, suggest that participants were engaging in a ‘democracy of the streets’ (Thornton 2010). Fifty thousand people were said to have participated in the protest over tuition fees (Huffington Post 2011). In the same year, several inner cities across England saw an outbreak of social unrest. Up to 15,000 people are believed to have taken part, with the majority of those aged under 24 (Riots Communities and Victims Panel 2011: 26). It has been argued that a lack of trust in the political class and a perceived lack of moral leadership by politicians was a significant factor behind the riots (Birch and Allen 2012). Public reactions to these examples of political engagement were not always positive, not least because participants were prepared to break the law to make their opinions and feelings heard, including not only rioters, but also a small number of participants in the student protests. A few vented their anger by attacking, for example, a war memorial and members of the royal family. Some observers considered attacks on such symbols of the nation particularly ‘uncivic’. Protesters were described as ‘yobs’ and ‘thugs’ (Harris 2010; Tart 2010). Looking at these events from within the context of our own research we would argue that the rioters and protesters of 2010 and 2011 have more in common with our research participants than might be supposed. Our research participants may not share the same socioeconomic background as many of the rioters, but they are all young people who would like to have their voices heard, but don’t really know how. They have little trust in political leaders and struggle to gain mainstream acceptance for their way of ‘doing politics’. Our findings suggest that analysis of popular culture can be an interesting and valuable tool for citizenship education and a ‘way into politics’ for young people. Our research also suggests that analysis of popular culture can be an interesting and valuable tool for this kind of citizenship education. Our

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respondents may profess little interest in formal politics, and may be uninterested in talking about it, but they did discuss political issues in relation to popular culture with confidence and ease. Popular culture is central to young people’s lives and having knowledge of a range of cultural texts is important for their social interaction. They have recognised popular culture as important and ‘for them’. What they might struggle with at times is making the connection that we have made in our research, which is that between talk about popular culture and citizen engagement. It was interesting for us to observe that our respondents were cautious about exploring the contribution their conversations about television, popular music and video games could make to politics (much more cautious than we were). It is here, we think, that media and cultural studies as a subject can make a valuable contribution. Media studies is taught at both GCSE and A-level in UK schools. Yet it is frequently under attack. Dismissed as a ‘Mickey Mouse’ subject it has been criticised for making little contribution to the national economy or the public good. It is considered as an easy option, not as demanding as traditional core subjects such as English or mathematics. Similarly, media studies is a well established, but equally maligned subject at British universities. Cultural studies, its close ‘ally’, is disappearing from most departments, with the closure of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 2002 a key point in its gradual decline. In What’s Become of Cultural Studies? Graeme Turner (2012) notes that one of the problems with cultural studies has been its refusal of disciplinary straitjackets. Cultural studies celebrates interdisciplinarity. From its beginnings, it has embraced a range of methodologies and research interests. While one of its greatest strengths, this celebration of flexibility has also been one of its greatest challenges. Cultural studies re-energised other disciplines by making popular culture an object of research, yet it struggled to gain institutional recognition precisely because it did not manage, or refused to conform to, the conventions of a discipline. Cultural studies failed to securely establish itself as a discipline with a clear intellectual development and research methods. For its students this has meant that they often have an impressive knowledge of a range of cultural issues, but not all that much of a sense of what cultural studies as a discipline might be. We would agree with Turner and argue that media and cultural studies should be a politically engaged intellectual practice. A central thread running through cultural studies and media studies for that matter is an interest in the public good. It is one of its defining principles

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and it is this principle that we think can and should inform media and cultural studies in the UK. It is what should inspire students in schools and at university. It is also, we think, the reason why media studies, as a subject at GCSE and A-level, is an important partner to citizenship studies. If students get to learn the intellectual history, methods and principles of media and cultural studies, they have the opportunity to look at their cultural likes with fresh eyes. They gain the skills necessary to see that a comedy like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air can be about politics. Moreover, they gain the cultural awareness necessary to ask whether by dismissing this programme as ‘just a comedy’, they themselves might reinforce a set of cultural hierarchies that marginalises young people like themselves. Together, media studies and citizenship studies can help young people reflect on their views on these hierarchies and provide them with the tools they need to effectively challenge or sustain them. Politics and policy To politicians we would say: consider securing a place not only for citizenship studies, but also media studies in school curricula. Consider securing funding streams for media and cultural studies in higher education. Yet to politicians we would also say, reflect on how you communicate with young citizens. Our respondents were deeply suspicious of politicians’ motives. They described them as people who pursue a particular policy because ‘it is their job’. They thought politicians were boring, but also argumentative, bossy and not like ordinary citizens. Our respondents told us several things which we think are important for politicians who want to engage with young citizens and who want to get them interested in politics. Politicians need to come across as genuine and as people who care about an issue. Young people are not averse to the idea that politics can be passionate and emotional. They like to know if someone’s personal experience has informed their political views. Politicians who might be willing to reveal a little bit about themselves, who explain why something matters to them, might not gain ‘legend’ status like Kanye West, but they might improve their chances of being trusted and listened to. Of course, what politicians also need to keep in mind is that young people are looking for genuine feelings and experiences. Politicians who pretend they are someone they are not, have no chance of being respected by young people like our respondents. If you are a politician, it is not necessary to pretend you have the latest and much talked about album on your playlist. There

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is no need to pretend you can rap or play air guitar. All young people want is to know who you are and why what you do matters to you and them. To politicians we would also suggest that it might be time to help legitimise alternative performances of authority and power. The display of emotions, giggling and a youthful demeanour should have a place in politics. Formal politics is important. However, the performance of importance is something that can be off-putting to a young person who is making the first tentative steps towards engagement in formal politics. There are also further policy implications. This has to do with the place of popular culture in public service broadcasting. Recent years have seen an increasing anxiety about media plurality, particularly as media is globalised and deregulated. The focus of the plurality debate has been on political diversity, on the range of different views that are available. This is clearly important. But typically, this notion of plurality has focused on news and current affairs media. We would argue that entertainment media need to be viewed in a similar light, for them to be reviewed in terms of their contribution to media plurality, and by implication the democratic health of popular communication. The discussions we heard about how the judges behaved on talent shows were just a microcosm of a more general public conversation about how people are and should be treated. The regulation of communications has a place to play in enabling such conversations and in setting standards for public life more generally. Such thoughts have implications, too, for the cultural industries more generally. Representing politics Last but not least, of those who produce popular culture we would ask that politics and citizen engagement get represented in a diverse and nuanced way. We spent much time in this book arguing that popular culture offers many opportunities to engage with identity politics. We suggested that our respondents use popular culture to position themselves as members of regional and national communities, and explored how they sought out representations of issues that were relevant to their age group. We highlighted how some of these young people used popular culture to maintain and express a connection with their diasporic homeland. Identity politics features prominently in popular culture. We are less sure if popular culture provides equally ample opportunity to engage with formal politics. We think there might be a connec-

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tion between the representation of governments and political actors in popular culture and our respondents’ rather pessimistic views of their own political efficacy and politicians’ motives. We do not want to argue that popular culture should misrepresent formal politics. What we do argue, however, is that the potential popular culture can make to democracy could be increased if there were more opportunities to encounter representations of active citizens who make policy suggestions and who seek to contribute to formal politics. It would be useful to see examples of the role citizens and young citizens in particular can play to address issues of public concern. Moreover, it would be good to see examples of such civic engagement addressing issues that concern young people. The examples of civically engaged people need not be limited to the age group of first-time voters, the age group we focused on in our research. In several European countries, including the UK, there is a discussion of whether the voting age should be lowered from 18 to 16. In 2004, the Electoral Commission in the UK recommended that the minimum age for all levels of voting at UK public elections should remain at 18 years (Electoral Commission 2004) and some have argued that young people are politically less mature than older people (e.g. Chan and Clayton 2006) . Yet the discussion is ongoing. In 2010, for example, the think tank Demos suggested that lowering the voting age would be an important measure to engage a large section of the British population who find themselves disenfranchised from politics (BBC 2010). In 2014, 16 and 17 year olds in Scotland will have opportunity to show whether they feel ready and interested enough to participate in a national election, as the Scottish government recently announced its intention to lower the voting age to 16 (Bloxham 2011). While some public commentators suspect that the Scottish government endorsed this plan in an attempt to boost the number of nationalist voters (ibid.) the move nevertheless represents an important, and some might say long overdue, shift in the political landscape. The UK Youth Parliament in its 2011/12 manifesto argues that ‘16 and 17 year-olds are long overdue the right to vote in public elections in the UK’ (UK Youth Parliament 2011: 6). Its members also suggest that ‘the place of citizenship education in the curriculum should be radically overhauled through a youth-led UK-wide review’ (UK Youth Parliament 2011: 2). It recommends that the review should ‘explore the meaning and scope of “citizenship” along the following lines. ... Young people should be taught the basics of democracy and their rights and roles in society through an impartial political education’ (ibid.).

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We think that citizenship education in schools, but also popular culture, can help meet this challenge by exploring what it means to be a citizen and showing examples of how citizens, including young citizens, go about making a difference in the world. News media in the US and the UK routinely represent or evoke citizens (Lewis et al. 2005). Public opinion is represented in opinion polls and ‘vox pops’, and in journalists’ often vague hints at widely shared public sentiment, or by reference to what ‘some people might think’ (ibid.). Yet it seems that there are rarely examples of citizens proposing a course of action. The public predominantly appears reacting to politics, rather than actively contributing to it. We think that if news media fail to step up to the mark, other genres and cultural forms might be able to help. Our research has shown that a wide range of television genres, popular music and video games represent political issues and are a resource young people use for citizen engagement. By representing a wide concept of ‘the citizen’ and citizen engagement, by offering opportunities to encounter citizens who seek to make a difference, popular culture might just be able to increase its potential to re-energise politics and civic engagement.

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Index

Aarseth, Espen 66 Adorno, Theodor 11–13, 24 aesthetic judgements 4, 13, 114 affect 5, 20, 35–6, 55–6, 60–2, 137 see also emotion affinity 5, 20, 32, 35–7, 55–6, 59–60, 112–15, 137 see also identity Allen, Lily 97 Anderson, Benedict 20, 60 authenticity 70–2, 76–7, 81–2, 102, 117 Barnhurst, Kevin 40–1 BBC 87, 114 Benjamin, Walter 12 Bennett, Andy 14 Bennett, Jane 20, 61, 133 Besley, John 17–18, 39 Bhavnani, Kum-Kum 4 Big Brother 21, 61, 94 Billig, Michael 32, 125 Bloom, Allan 13 Bono 91–2 bricoleur politics 27–8, 115 Brown, Gordon 92, 94 Buckingham, David 31, 42–3, 48, 51–2, 60, 72–3, 78–9 business 81–2, 98 Cantor, Paul 60 capitalism 11–13 see also business celebrity politicians 6, 86–103 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 12–14, 140 children 79

citizenship education 138–40, 143–4 civic engagement 16–18, 24–8, 31–6, 39 see also democracy, ideal type citizens, political action, political knowledge, rationality citizen engagement 20, 24–5, 31–6, 40, 118–19, 124, 137 see also affect, affinity, communities of interest, identity, public connectedness Clarkson, Jeremy 87, 97 class 10–13, 33 Coldplay 92 Cole, Cheryl 100 Coleman, Stephen 58, 61 communities of interest 4–5, 60, 104, 109–19 see also affinity Couldry, Nick 5, 21–2, 31, 38–41, 61, 90–1 Cowell, Simon 84, 87, 97–100, 107–8 critical theory 11 critical thinking 129, 131–2 see also rationality cultural studies 10, 29–30, 140–1 cultural turn 9 culture industry, the 11–13 Curran, James 55 Cushion, Stephen 116 Dahlgren, Peter 22, 31–3, 52 democracy 2–3, 17, 24–5, 28–9, 86, 88–9, 131, 143 see also voting diaspora 30, 111–12

162 discourse 42, 73–4, 76–82, 102 see also media literate discourse distant suffering 34–5, 123–4 Donald Duck 12 Dorr, Aimée 71–2 dumbing down 86, 103, 107 Dunsmore, Kate 40 Eastenders 74–5 EastWest 101 32 Economic and Social Research Council 5 Eminem 87, 94 emotion 6, 11, 20, 35–6, 56, 60–2, 100, 117, 121, 124, 128, 133, 136–7 see also affect ethics 60–1, 83, 133 Eyerman, Ron 15–16 fans 20 femininity 100–1 feminist media research 28, 30 focus group methodology 49–52, 73, 126 folk culture 8, 11 Frankfurt School 5, 11 Freud, Sigmund 11 Friends 123–4 Frith, Simon 60 Geldof, Bob 92 Goody, Jade 94–6 Graham, Todd 21, 51 Gramsci, Antonio 12 Grand Theft Auto 77, 130 Green Lantern 34 Grossberg, Lawrence 14–15, 61 Hajru, Auli 21 Hall, Peter 17 Hall, Stuart 54 Halo 2  46, 64–6 Hay, Colin 4, 22 Hay, Kellie 34 hegemony 12 Hell’s Kitchen 81–2 Hermes, Joke 31, 33 Hesmondhalgh, David 14 Hollyoaks 46, 62–4, 74, 117 Hooghe, Marc 18, 39 Horkheimer, Max 12, 24 humour 96, 125–6

INDEX

ideal type citizens 25–6, 31, 33, 120, 124 identity 6, 20, 25–30, 32, 42, 60, 93, 104–19 national identity 109–15 regional identity 109–13 see also affinity ideology 11–15 infotainment 89, 116 internet 26, 45, 47, 106, 109 interview methodology 49–52, 73 Jackson, David 22 Jamison, Andrew 15–16 Johnny Got His Gun 67 Jones, Jeffrey 27 Jones, Steve 65 Kane, Pat 130 Kaya, Ayhan 112 Kellner, Douglas 3, 19, 58–60 Lagos, Taso 40 Leavis, F. R. 10 lyrics 48, 67, 81 Markham, Tim 90–1 Marshall, T. H. 5 Marxism 11–14, 28 masculinity 99–101, 108–9, 115–16 McClean, Georgie 32 McDonald, Kevin 15 media literacy 71 media literate discourse 42, 73–81 media studies 140–1 see also cultural studies Messenger-Davies, Maire 72 Metallica 46, 66–8 Minogue, Kylie 95–6, 100 Moyles, Chris 87, 96–7 music 3, 15–16, 44–5, 47–8, 60, 66–8, 81–2, 111, 128–9 Nash, Kate 28 neoliberalism 14, 61 Norris, Pippa 17 ‘One’ 67–8 Orman, John 87–9 Palin, Sarah 100–101 Palmer-Mehta, Valerie 34 Parry, Geraint 21

163

INDEX

Plato 10 play theory 129–130 pleasure 6, 20, 60–2, 83, 107, 121–34 points of engagement 48, 55–69 police 59, 63–4, 83 policy 141–2 political action 9–10, 15–16, 42, 59–60 see also voting political efficacy 24, 26, 116, 120, 138 political knowledge 5, 18–20, 26, 31–2, 36, 55–9, 75, 122 political engagement see citizen engagement politicians 86–9, 92–103, 141–2 Postman, Neil 13 power 4, 9, 28, 32, 51, 54, 62–3, 70–85, 87, 98 Prior, Markus 18 proto-political 52, 113, 127 public connectedness 31, 34, 42, 120–3, 133 public service broadcasting 142 Putnam, Robert 3, 16–18, 24, 59 race 25, 30, 122 Rambo 59–60 rationality 9, 35, 61, 89, 131, 133, 137 see also critical thinking real 58, 63, 70–85, 117, 131–2 reality television 122 ‘Respect’ 68 riots 6, 139 Rojek, Chris 94 Rose, Jonathan 10 Ross, Alex 67 schools 46, 49–50 Scruton, Roger 13 Shah, Dhavan 18, 39 Silverstone, Roger 61 sitcom 29, 113, 122, 125 soap opera 18, 45, 58, 62–4, 123 social acceptability 125–7 social capital 17, 39 social interaction 47–8, 105–9 Social Movement Theory 15–16, 61

social movements 15–16 Stahl, Roger 65 Steinberg, Marc 15 Stello, Cindy 31, 33 ‘Stronger’ 68 subculture 13–14 Sugar, Alan 85, 99, 101 survey methodology 19, 39, 41, 45–7, 110 talk 3, 21–3, 42, 49–52, 69, 73, 107–9 television 3, 17, 44–5, 47–8, 57, 73–6, 105 television news 24, 27–9, 44, 56, 75–7, 144 Temple, Mick 116 textual analysis 43, 45, 47–9 The Apprentice 81–2 see also Sugar, Alan The Daily Show 18, 21 The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air 122 The Hills 122–3 The Simpsons 60 The Sims 126–7 The West Wing 20, 21, 29 The X Factor 81–2, 103, 109, 125 see also Cowell, Simon Thompson, E. P. 10 transcoding 58 trust 102 Turner, Graeme 140 values 32–3, 36–7, 82–3, 95, 112 van Zoonen, Liesbet 19–20, 57, 59 video games 3, 44–5, 47–8, 64–6, 77–80, 82–4, 105–7, 126–7 voting 18, 21, 26, 90, 95–6, 143 see also political action Walser, Robert 67 West, Darrell 87–9 West, Kanye 46, 68, 93, 123 Williams, Raymond 10, 20 Yes, Prime Minister 29 youth 95–6 young people 2 , 42, 91, 139, 143