The future of public connection: some early sightings

This paper explores the nature and extent of citizens’ connection to public space through media consumption. It reports on a study of data from two qualitative sources: panel responses and individual in-depth interviews. The authors’ initial findings are, first, that people’s media consumption and forms of public connection may be significantly constrained by limitations on their time: not just objectively, but also the subjective sense of not having enough time to use media or pursue information. Second, such is the complexity of how people think about their public connection that research methodologies must be sensitive to the details of people’s reflexivity, while enabling effective typologies of the positions people take up in thought and practice. Third, such research may reveal not a consensus, but instead a range of incompatible framings of whether public connection matters and how it can be achieved. The conclusion comments on the methodological implications of this pilot work for the related large-scale project ‘Media Consumption and the Future of Public Connection’, which one of the authors (Couldry) is beginning with Sonia Livingstone in October 2003 as part of the ESRC’s Cultures of Consumption programme.