Abstract
Dahlgren and Hill's book offers an excellent introduction and advancement to our understanding of people’s engagement with media. Acknowledging the complexities of the term media engagement, it comes close to a definition when it positions time spent with media as ‘a significant psychological investment in something or someone who matters in that moment or over a longer period’ (p. 156).
Situated as a work of critical media research, it evaluates media engagement as an aspect of broader power relations. This relational aspect positions the work as complementary to theory and analysis that is media centred without being media-centric. It also contributes to Dahlgren's previous work on political engagement and the public sphere, mindful of the political, economic, socio-cultural, historical and technical aspects of media production, symbolic form, distribution and engagement. The book’s structure breaks down into two chapters on mapping engagement, two on contexts for engagement, and three on case studies of engagement.
The introductory chapter reflects on the much-changed hybrid media ecology and our relationships with media. The next one provides five parameters for evaluating media engagement as an aspect of socio-cultural production rather than purely a media use or consumption metric. The parameters are media context (societal factors), motivations (intentionality), modalities (cognition and emotion), intensities (emotional force) and consequences (outcomes). These parameters act as points of entry for empirical analyses of situated engagement with myriad examples ranging from televised wrestling, domestic media use and changing television cultures. This is a critical intervention in the current economic interest in media engagement shaped by commodifying media users’ activity. Dahlgren and Hill are keen to move away from the moment of media activity across devices to consider the human experience that anticipates, shapes and unfolds from media engagement. The emphasis here is on the full spectrum of the socio-cultural value of engagement.
The chapters on vectors of media and political engagement outline the entwinement of the political and media engagement that the book envisions. Here it is assumed that the two are inseparable. This entwinement is promising, but the sections are broken up into two: political engagement and media engagement. Following an overview of political struggle by social movements, mediated and non-mediated public spheres and civic cultures are interlinked as theoretical foundations for understanding media/political engagement. It would have been beneficial to merge these two chapters. When discussing the relationship among public spheres, civic cultures and social movements, it should be acknowledged that all social struggles are also struggles over mediated resources of representation and recognition.
For the case studies, there is a switch in register and a sense that we are moving from media to journalism studies. They look to operationalise the five parameters of news engagement in Vietnamese, Malaysian and Belarusian contexts. The focus on detailed qualitative analysis is refreshing in the context and hype surrounding large data sets. The non-European based case studies are also informative, widening our understanding of quasi-authoritarian media systems. The case studies illustrate the parameters of media engagement. The importance of context speaks to the vital intersection of media, social, political and cultural dynamics in evaluating the other four parameters. In the Malaysian and Vietnamese case studies, the relational aspects of engagement with political communication in mediated and non-mediated contexts point to an absence of trust in public discussion spaces and the importance of the family as a micro public sphere. Importantly they highlight, in authoritarian political action, not news avoidance but the negation of news. The negation arises from ‘feelings of despair for public knowledge as presented in mainstream news’ (p. 125). This is an important correlation to studies of new avoidance that tends to diagnose news exposure as an antidote to disengagement. People can feel like something is wrong with their news and political system, and those feelings can be reasonable. It is reasonable to ask why people feel journalism has little to offer them when it comes to understanding and engaging with their world.
In contrast, the Belarusian case studies detail how offline and online communicative spaces are the product of infrastructure allowing for hybrid activism. Public courtyards, street protests and improvised online media sites enabled coordination, collective action and information that bound activities and identities together. Alternative media offerings, a form of activist journalism, intensified hope rather than negation. Mediated networking also provided affective outlets for more expansive democratic value systems that were then shaped into a collective vision by widely disparate actors.
If there is a criticism, it is the focus on political engagement and the role of news media being to the fore. Having established the broad role of culture and the socio-cultural value of engagement, the possibility of evaluating engagement with fictional and multi-generic media forms was wide open. The role and politics of public culture are thus somewhat elided in favour of informational media. The integrated role of media engagement’s socio-political and social-cultural value could have been better reflected in the case studies. There are also many points where the authorial voice changes, marking disjuncture in the narrative and argument.
Overall, this short book achieves a lot. It can be recommended as an exemplar of the best media studies that combine political economy, social and cultural media theory and empirical research. Its critical perspective focuses on broader questions of what difference media make in social relations and how that is shaped by and contributes to overlapping configurations of power relations. There is no special pleading for extant media industries or threadbare models of democracy that are implicit in many current critiques of news/informational media (dis)engagement, yet medium still matters. Instead, the focus is on theoretically grounded and situated analysis that illuminates the nature of mediated engagement in a complex and volatile world. It also provides theoretical frameworks and research tools for readers and students to forward their understanding of these pivotal issues in media studies.