I begin this chapter by looking at how forms of citizenship with an “activist and communitarian ethic” (Hartley, J 2010: 240) might be engendered through the everyday technology use and communication practices outlined in the previous chapter. Given that hyperlocal journalism seems to be a form native to the Internet, and the ways in which digital technologies are now playing a key role in the production and distribution of news media, I then outline the various utopian and dystopian positions on the value of technology in journalism, suggesting that networked digital technologies can offer a route for greater participation of citizens in the production and distribution of news. Finally, I will draw on ideas of the public sphere, and alternative/counter-public spheres, in order to frame this discussion.
Journalism and citizenship
In his article entitled ‘Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Became a Citizen Journalist’, Barry Parr (2005), a journalist who set up a hyperlocal site for a coastal community in California, notes that the gatekeeping role in journalism had all but disappeared: “every citizen journalist is also a citizen publisher” (2005). Parr argues that his citizen journalism activity both ties him to the community and in turn, ties them to each other. Yet he has a discomfort with the way in which the concept is expressed in commentary: “It implies that the roles of citizen and journalist are separate, and I’m some weird sort of hybrid. All journalists are citizens, aren’t we?” (2005). Luke Goode (2009) outlines the various positions taken in academic literature towards the role citizens play in journalism. On the one hand, they are framed to represent a kind of ‘post- modern’ journalism where the process of crowdsourcing and collaboration produce fluid
meanings and unfixed outcomes. In contrast, “there remains a tendency to invoke a modernist, heroic narrative” (Goode 2009: 1290). Goode argues that citizens now have the chance to involve themselves in many areas of the newsmaking process, not just in content creation but also “rating, commenting, tagging and reposting” news stories on mainstream news websites and dedicated social news services (2009: 1290). Jane Singer (2014) recognises these actions as ‘two-step gatekeeping’, whereby editors make initial editorial decisions but the user can then “upgrade or downgrade the visibility of that item for a secondary audience (2014: 67). Goode claims we can consider such actions to be a kind of ‘metajournalism’, thus allowing us
to situate our analysis of the citizen as journalist “within a framework of mediation” [his italics] (Goode 2009: 1291).
Yet a broader articulation of the citizen’s role in journalism inevitably meets resistance. Brian McNair focuses on how journalists and media organisations need to form a rearguard action in the face of a threat to their trusted position. Whilst acknowledging that institutions should embrace user-generated content, McNair argues that it should remain a news source and that the act of “critical, creative thinking” is very much one only trained journalists can carry out (McNair 2012: 87). Nothing less than the ‘survival’ of journalism is at stake, he claims. Gary Hudson and Mick Temple offer an equally acerbic critique in their essay ‘We Are Not All Journalists’ (2010), arguing that many academics are “stretching the concept of journalism to extremes” (2010: 66) by claiming that any ‘user’ who generates news content is therefore a journalist. Kevin Barnhurst (2013) has claimed that this ‘fear’ around the rise of the citizen journalist is built around the notion of active citizenship as a failed endeavour in the eyes of journalists and political scientists: “it imagined an unreachable ideal that ignored how people enact citizenship in daily life and devalued their political passions” (2013: 218). The lofty stance taken by journalists “guaranteed that citizens would fail” (2013: 218).
Encouraging ‘active’ citizenship
The sense that journalism is looking down its nose at citizens is endorsed by Justin Lewis, who argues that “citizenship is implicated in the discourse of news but in forms that are neither enticing nor engaging, and never centre stage” (2006: 312). The news industry is ‘top-down’, therefore the citizen is more likely than not positioned as recipient or consumer, allowed a voice only through the ‘vox-pop’. Lewis and Barnhurst (2013) share the concern that without a shift in journalism’s form, ‘active’ citizenship will fail to flourish. To a degree, Lewis argues for that shift to be towards the everyday: “the focus on the spectacular rather than the typical – endemic in news coverage of crime, for example – rarely implicates citizenship in useful or informative ways” (2006: 315). The ideal of the ‘active’ citizen is explored by Tony Harcup (2011), who argues that alternative media is awash with examples of this being fostered but that it remains “little discussed within mainstream literature about relationships between journalism and politics” (2011: 15). To be ‘active’ requires both agency and participation, according to Harcup. He draws on the work of feminist political theorist Chantal Mouffe, who claims that: “a radical, democratic citizen must be an active citizen, somebody who acts as a citizen, who conceives of herself as a participant in a collective undertaking” (Mouffe in Harcup
2011). The possibility of active citizenship is that it opens up opportunities for alternative voices in the public sphere. Harcup makes it clear that alternative media has a central role to play:
It is by encouraging and reflecting a culture of participation that alternative media projects can be seen as supportive of active citizenship; and it is by being participatory forms of media that such projects themselves constitute a form of active citizenship. (2011: 27)
Harcup later goes on to ask the question: “To what extent can an engagement with alternative journalism foster active citizenship?” (2015b: 2). Drawing on his audience study of a hyperlocal website in Leeds, he notes the valuable role that this website plays in holding local power to account. However, although the audience self-identifies as active, he questions whether “some people choose to consume alternative journalism not as an integral part of their civic activism but as an alternative to engaging in civic activism at all” (Harcup 2015b: 2).
The citizen as participant and as consumer
Studies of citizen-led, participatory and user-generated content (UGC) initiatives or experiments (Bruns et al. 2008, Chen et al. 2012, Fröhlich et al. 2012) have tended to emphasise the effective role played by engaging citizens in media-making experiences and their subsequent positive impact on the public sphere. Wardle and Williams (2010), in
research examining the use of UGC at the BBC in 2007 (see also Wahl-Jorgensen et al. 2010, Wardle and Williams 2008), argue that their work has a lesson for journalism studies scholars. They note the positive impact of UGC initiatives but claim that a redefining of terms would help “to further understand the relationship which exists between audiences and media producers in terms of ‘Audience comment’, ‘Audience content’, ‘Collaborative content’ and ‘Networked journalism’” (Wardle and Williams 2010: 786). Alex Bruns (2008) emphasises the role that content production plays in enhanced citizenship. He describes the ability to create and share online content as ‘produsage’: “the capacity to be an active produser […] equates increasingly with the capacity for active, participatory citizenship” (2008: 339). He cites citizen journalism as a key example of how produsage behaviour: “can be seen to help build the capacities for active forms of cultural and democratic citizenship” (2008: 398). In examining the culture of groups of ‘produsers’, Bruns argues that social capital plays a key role: “sustained and constructive participation leads enables the accumulation of positive social capital” (2008:
341). José van Dijck’s essay (2009) on new approaches to studying user-generated content sees a problem in current academic approaches to the practice: “conceptually and
methodologically, media scholars will need to devise new ways to assess content trends across these new production platforms” (van Dijck 2009: 55). However, John Hartley (2009) sees the potential of participatory forms of journalism as examples of “user-led innovation” that will reshape and even undermine commercial models of public service journalism (Hartley 2009: 162).
Hartley has discussed notions of citizenship throughout much of his work on media audiences. In large part, he has focused on consumption practices and the ways in which citizenship is mediated (1987, 2002b). He notes the tensions inherent in the debate about the citizen’s position between political sovereignty and consumerism sovereignty (2002a). The former is enacted through the choices we make in elections, whereas the latter “suggests that our choices as consumers are our primary means of exerting influence over the market” (2002a: 37). Hartley rejects the divide between the two and argues that ‘consumption’ is a vital concept in understanding how citizenship works: “our cultural consumption, and in particular our media consumption teach us about our society and to how to act in it” (2002a: 37). Nick Couldry makes a similar point in arguing that there is value in examining “the possibilities for more dispersed symbolic production (image-making, information distribution) embedded within new models of consumption” (2004: 24). Couldry argues that we might find what he describes as the ’dispersed citizen’ by examining “websites or portals that collect information for
consumption and civic activism on a relatively local scale” (2004: 25). Couldry makes an explicit call for researchers to recognise that there are “new contexts of public communication and trust” (2004: 26), contexts that may include consumption practices as well as explicit citizenship practices. He makes clear his object of study: “the productive and distributional potential of the internet is central” (2004: 26).
Towards creative – ‘silly’ – citizenship
Couldry’s later research (2006) into the ways in which citizens connect through their media consumption is an attempt to look for ‘cultures of citizenship’. He draws on an analytical model by Peter Dahlgren who argues that modern citizenship in democracies is “multi-dimensional and protean” (2003: 159). In suggesting an analytical framework to allow analysis of citizens’ political involvement and use of media, Dahlgren wants us to consider how civic engagement happens in the everyday through cultural expression and engagement: “civic culture […] is
anchored in the practices and symbolic milieu of everyday life” (2003: 153). Dahlgren argues that this ‘civic culture’ is important for democracy and comprises six interlocking processes (values, affinity, knowledge, practices, identities and discussion). He is optimistic about the role the Internet might play in strengthening civic culture: “looked at from the standpoint of any and all of our six dimensions there are clear alternatives emerging on the Internet” (2003: 153). Couldry critiques aspects of Dahlgren’s model, but uses it in his (2006) qualitative exploration of how people engage through media with the world around them. To a degree, there seems to be a ‘culture’ of citizenship evidenced in the way people talk about aspects of their cultural consumption or even in the way they talk about their work. However, he does not find much evidence of connectedness happening through the media: “we did not find any case where this sense of collective connection through media – important pleasure though it may be, we make no judgement on that – connected with any discussion, action or thought about issues of public concern” (2006: 334).
In more recent work, John Hartley (2010) argues that rather than seeing citizenship through an individual’s media consumption, we need to focus on their capacity to create and distribute media using online platforms. This DIY/DIWO (Do It Yourself / Do It With Others) citizenship is “more individuated and privatised than previous types, because it is driven by voluntarist choices and affiliations, but at the same time it has an activist and communitarian ethic, where ‘knowledge shared is knowledge gained’” (2010: 240). To a degree, Hartley argues, we have arrived at a point where the importance of ‘Silly Citizenship’ should not be underestimated – ‘silly’ being a way to describe the often bizarre mix of cultural mash-ups and seemingly frivolous dance videos that have become extremely popular on YouTube. Around such creative content, communities (usually of interest rather than geographic) come together and “self-organise and self-represent, and act both culturally and politically, without bearing the weight of ‘standing for’ the whole society” (2010: 240). Such frivolity perhaps shows the limitations of understanding the public sphere in a narrow Habermasian sense: “While it may not look very much like the Habermasian public sphere, it is clearly attracting the attention of those who are notoriously hard to reach by traditional technologies of citizenship” (2010: 241).
Creating value for citizens
Whilst journalism has always sought input from citizens, there is recognition by both
academics and the media themselves that the relationship is changing. The Internet-based resources available to the citizen with which they can be both producer and gatekeeper are
striking in their ease of use and their potential impact, which, as Goode (2009) points out, is impact in terms of reaching audience and also in exerting editorial control. Doubts may remain amongst professionals about how to best make use of citizen-created content, but it has become clear that managing and verifying such material is something mainstream media organisations now have to incorporate into their production processes. In some ways, the relationship between the citizen and the journalism industry has become increasingly complex and messy.
How citizenship is expressed online ranges from more direct expressions of political or advocacy blogging (‘writer-gatherers’, as Couldry 2010 calls them) to acts of consumership. Indeed, if we were to see such value in consumer choice as an important aspect of citizenship, then we might regard those more commercially-orientated local hyperlocal websites as serving a useful citizenship function; that is, the act of buying locally, prompted by geo-aware
applications, as a form of enacting local civic duty (perhaps in turn being activist by resisting the lures of more corporate ‘chain’ offerings online or in shopping malls). Wider online participation has also led to greater cultural expression outside mainstream media channels and certainly outside what we might regard as the norms of journalistic practices. This leads John Hartley (2010) to argue that there is value in understanding the ‘sillier’ aspects of online expressions of citizenship, where seemingly individual acts can take on a life of their own, gathering pace and becoming memetic in nature, remixed and remediated along the way. Yet our concern here ultimately echoes that of Tony Harcup, who argues that “the production of alternative and participatory forms of media” (2011: 15) is one of the ways in which active citizenship is enacted. His view is that in turn this may well foster active citizenship in the wider population. Whilst his later case study (Harcup 2015b) has him doubting this view a little, it is clear he sees value in alternative local media publications as making an important contribution to the public sphere.
Hyperlocal’s place in the Public Sphere
Chris Morley (2013), a senior officer in the National Union of Journalists and a former local journalist, argues that the ‘havoc’ wreaked by media owners wanting to extract as much economic value as possible from a declining local press means that the case should be made for local newspapers to be seen as community assets and therefore to allow them to be
public good, while standing up for those that do not have a voice?” (Morley 2013).
Practitioners such as Morley are not alone in lamenting the “apparently remorseless advance of the market as the arbiter of the nature, the content, the form, the labour relations and mode of production and the ownership of the local press” (Franklin and Murphy 1998: 22). In their account of recent scholarship about the ‘crisis’ in the newspaper industry (a ‘crisis’ of declining audiences and income streams), Siles and Boczkowski (2012) note that the lack of empirical studies has not stopped academics stating “that the crisis has had negative implications for democracy because it undermines the watchdog role traditionally played by the press and its significance as a vehicle for free speech” (2012: 1380). Morley’s community-led vision of local journalism’s future reveals, as does much of the commentary around hyperlocal, attitudes to the role of local newsmaking in the public sphere.
For many, as I indicated in the previous section, hyperlocal journalism can potentially fulfil the role that Morley describes. In short, it may play a valuable role in rejuvenating a ‘denigrated’ public sphere whose journalism is “turning people off citizenship rather than equipping them to fulfil their democratic potential” (McNair 2002: 8). Moreover, as Luke Goode argues, there is an inevitability about citizen journalism initiatives feeding the democratic imagination, “because it fosters an unprecedented potential, at least, for news and journalism to become part of a conversation” (Goode 2009: 1294). For Chen et al., hyperlocals “serve not only as a traditional information source but also as a forum for ongoing discussion of local affairs and a mechanism for building and strengthening relationships among local residents” (2012: 932). James Curran notes that the “divergence of approach between liberal and radical perspectives [on the public sphere] also give rise to different normative judgements about the practice of journalism” (Curran 1991: 32). Liberal-plural judgements certainly seem to infuse the current discussion on hyperlocal, essentially seeing it as playing a useful role in the democratic functioning of society, where it can seemingly help citizens to engage with local democracy and understand the political alternatives facing them: “it is clear that the hyperlocal news sector has a considerable contribution to make to media provision, plurality of voice, democratic scrutiny, accountability and information provision at a local level” (Carnegie UK Trust 2014: 13). Hyperlocal journalism, therefore, has arrived just at the moment when the public sphere seems to be at its most degraded (certainly in a post-phone-hacking and post- Leveson era), and we should therefore consider whether its role is to support the rejuvenation of the public sphere, or to act as an alternative voice within it.
The Habermasian Public Sphere
Normative ideals about how citizens should be able to participate in decision-making in society are articulated in Jürgen Habermas’ work on the public sphere. In his key work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989, originally published in 1962 in German), he details the development of a bourgeois public sphere: “the sphere of private people come together as a public” (1989: 27). Within this specific historical phase and place (the 16th to 18th centuries in Western Europe), it was possible for citizens to use the “coffee houses, the salons, and the Tischgesellschaften (table societies)” (1989: 30) and engage in wide-ranging discussions about art, literature and ‘common concerns’. In essence, subjects that lay previously only within the domain of the church or state came within the domain of groups of private citizens who represented the ‘public’: “the issues discussed became ‘general’ not merely in their significance, but also in their accessibility: everyone had to be able to participate” (1989: 37). This in turn prepared the way for “human self-determination and political emancipation” (Hohendahl and Silberman 1979: 90). Habermas spends some time discussing the role of the media in the public sphere. He charts the way in which the 18th century press shifted from being primarily carriers of information to being editorialising vehicles through which the public were able to make their contribution felt in the public sphere: “the editorializing press as the institution of a discussing public was primarily concerned with asserting the latter's critical function” (1989: 184). However, with the establishment of the ‘state’ and its increasing influence, the press was left to focus on profit-making, with the result that by the Victorian period, its editorial freedom had become an illusion and newspapers more readily reflected the commercial interests of their owners, whilst doing their best to shape ‘public opinion’. This