Connection or Disconnection?: Tracking the Mediated Public Sphere in Everyday Life

Abstract

The decades-long debate on media and the public sphere has primarily been normative, rather than empirical, in character. We especially lack empirical research detailing how the mediated public sphere is enacted (if it is) in everyday life. There has been, we would argue, a significant gap in studying the experiential dimensions of citizenship (what it actually feels like to be a citizen (cf. LeBlanc, 1999)): indeed what are the practices which link private action to the public sphere, beyond the obvious act of walking down to the polling station to cast your vote?