2.1 Theories of digital media and politics

Media, and digital media, as argued in chapter 1, are an autonomous subsystem, a transmission belt between citizens and elites in the political process. ‘Citizens’ provide aggregate inputs into this process, but it would be equally appropriate to use the labels ‘people’, ‘civil society’ or ‘publics’ (indeed, these labels will be used interchangeably). The term ‘public arena’ is used, as mentioned in chapter 1, in order to avoid Habermas’ normatively laden ‘public sphere’ (see chapter 1), and this also points to the contestedness within this common but limited attention space. To understand the media and politics, the public (or publics) can be counterposed to political elites (which include civic activists, and also economic elites insofar as they are politically relevant actors). Media elites translate the agenda of political elites, plus ‘people’, into the media agenda. These political elites consist not just of powerful leaders, as Schudson (2011) has pointed out, for the vast bulk of sources of news are government officials. But elites that rule must also set and be responsive to the agendas of the public. And apart from this responsiveness on which the legitimacy of ruling elites is based, there are counterpublics (Fraser 1990), publics that challenge the status quo via media.

The measure of political change is the responsiveness of the political apparatus to citizens, mainly via the media as a transmission belt. For politics, only politically relevant communication and information should be considered, and the yardstick for this is whether they provide a representative and plural set of inputs into the political apparatus.¹ In a democratic society, these inputs should not, as much as possible, be skewed towards powerful elites or towards particularly powerful groups since they should be representative (Dahl 1998). Note, however, that the yardstick of responsiveness can also be applied to non-democratic China, though in this case there is a single, all-powerful elite (the party), which exercises strong control over the media agenda, and publics or counterpublics are kept within bounds.

At this stage we can briefly define ‘communication’ as comprising two-way one-to-one or one-to-many messages, whereas ‘information’ means the one-way obtaining of knowledge or data that makes a difference – in this case to how citizens cope with the political environment (or more broadly, makes a difference to how they cope with the physical and social environment – we will come back to this in the discussion of information seeking in chapter 5). ‘Media’ encompass both information and communication. In focusing on how media constitute the transmission belt of political responsiveness and politically relevant inputs then, an implicit premise – this argument was sketched out in chapter 1 – is that the political system can be separated from the economic and cultural systems (or political power separated from economic and cultural power). This separation is not controversial in mainstream political and social theory (Schroeder 2013; Mann 2013, especially 154–66), and makes sense of the idea (as Hallin and Mancini 2004 have argued) that media systems have become autonomous from market forces and from the political system.

Here we can come back briefly to the idea from chapter 1 that media are a ‘subsystem’, the transmission belt within the political system (even if media subsystems also separately serve the cultural system, as with socializing and information seeking, or the economic system, as with consuming entertainment, for example): their autonomy is from the public, from elites and from the political apparatus – but media serve to promote (or not) political change. This is why, although Williams and Delli Carpini (2011), among others, have pointed out that what is considered ‘political’ has widened with digital media beyond what it was with traditional media, they also say that it is nevertheless still important to delimit what falls within politically relevant media (and responsiveness and input), and I will follow them in this respect. As we shall see, this has implications for being able to delimit the aggregate political mediated responsiveness and input across all media, traditional and new or digital, in terms of the overall limits of attention or visibility – and thus for gatekeeping and agenda-setting.

In chapter 1, I discussed the problem that digital media no longer fits the models of mass versus interpersonal communication. This problem has also been discussed specifically with regard to the role of media in politics (for example, Bennett and Iyengar 2008; Neuman 2016). Many studies have analysed individual digital media or examined single countries, but studies to date have failed to contrast traditional and digital media in a holistic way. A possible exception is Castells (2009), who argues that networks have become pervasive, with the central conflict between globally dominant media corporations ranged against resistance by often transnational social movements. This theory crucially leaves out the nation-state within which politics is primarily bounded. Media systems are shaped by nation-states (Hallin and Mancini 2004) and the various economic systems. Further, Castells hypostatizes a ‘network society’, which, apart from not allowing for different media systems, also subsumes the difference that new technologies make under various types of networks.

However, even if much of political communication and information is moving online, it is worth bearing in mind that the vast bulk of political responsiveness and inputs still take place via traditional media, newspapers and television, rather than through new digital media. Chadwick argues that politics and the media (in the United States and the United Kingdom) are currently in a ‘hybrid’ transition from old to new: he says there is a ‘hybrid media system’ that ‘exhibits a balance between the older logics of transmission and reception and the newer logics of circulation, recirculation, and negotiation’ (2013, 208), with the balance still skewed towards the older logics (2013, 209). But this argument fails to pinpoint how the newer logics depart from the older logics in terms of their effects and workings. Second, Chadwick concludes (for the United States) that ‘political communication...is more polycentric than during the period of mass communication that dominated the twentieth century...the opportunities for ordinary citizens...are on balance greater than they were...[though it] is primarily political activists and the politically interested who are able to make a difference with newer media’(2013, 210). This overlooks, first, the way in which political and media elites (not just ‘ordinary citizens’) are also able to make more powerful uses of new media to monitor and respond to the public, and second that new media change not just those who are active and interested in politics, but can also shift attention and the agenda to new political forces, including political ‘outsiders’, who can use new media to circumvent traditional ones – as we shall see in the next chapter.

Another theory that potentially overcomes the focus on individual media is agenda-setting theory (McCombs 2013), where at least some studies have begun to examine how the agenda changes with the shift from old to new media (for example, Neuman et al. 2014). Agenda-setting provides a means of understanding the topics that are foregrounded by the media – not what media make people think, but what they make them think about. But while this theory can gauge agenda-setting across media, it leaves open the question of how the aggregate political agenda is translated between elites and citizens; in other words, it is a theory of media rather than of the media in society (as here). Further, and again as sketched out in chapter 1, this theory leaves out the fact that there is a limited attention space across all media, such that only certain topics become prominent enough to translate into political change. Bimber says that ‘competition for political attention [is] growing more aggressive, against a background of largely unchanged habits of political knowledge and learning’ (2003, 230), which leaves unanswered the question of what the effect of this greater competition might be.

Thompson (1995) speaks of a ‘struggle for visibility’, which comes close to the idea of a limited attention space. However, there is no sense of whether there is more space for visibility in this struggle with new media, and visibility overall is open-ended. Yet even if new media expand the diversity and volume of politically relevant information, there is a limited window across all media for fostering political change: on a rolling basis, this is a zero-sum window, unless new social forces – counterpublics – enter politics, or if new technologies generally broaden the input of citizens. As we shall see, they can do so, though within limits, with the rise of new political forces. In any event, even if some agendas cut across countries with different media systems, these systems are the main unit for analysing political communication and allow us to gauge this limited attention space. We can now turn to these.