Abstract
Concerns about young people’s lack of interest in and engagement with political issues have been repeatedly voiced both in political debates and in the academic literature (Forbrig, 2005; Wallace, 2003). Anne Kaun’s book – which employs online diaries and interviews with 59 young Estonians to analyse their everyday experience of citizenship, and the multiple ways in which media are interwoven with it – challenges these assumptions.
The focus of the book is on everyday forms of civic experience that do not necessarily result in concrete, easily recognisable expressions such as protests. Rather than taking the role of media as a given, the study explores how each medium is understood and interpreted by participants in their daily lives. Kaun’s data, of which extracts are provided to support the argument, demonstrate participants’ reflective and insightful engagement with their political and media environment. For example, some of the participants criticised the Estonian mass media for failing in what they saw as their duty to represent and inform the country’s citizens. The new media employed by the researcher for data collection purposes take, for participants, the role of providing an alternative voice to, or within, mass media.
One of the book’s most important contributions is the introduction of the concept of critical media connectors and critical media disconnectors. Although the critical faculties of mass media audiences have long been recognised and widely studied, Kaun highlights a significant new distinction in how participants respond when adopting a critical stance. While some use it as a reason to disengage (disconnect) with mass media, and become increasingly reliant on personal networks for some information, others use it to account for their engagement (connection) in media dialogues, such as giving feedback on online articles, in order to produce counter-narratives. This conception of a distinction in the use of, or reaction to, media criticism should prove useful for subsequent research in the field.
Kaun’s finding that celebrity culture can be a starting-point for the discussion of public issues is also important. As she states, it contradicts Couldry and Markham’s (2007) claim that celebrity culture cannot act as a route into politics. This perhaps warrants further research. Does Kaun’s finding suggest that differences between audiences make any generalisations problematic? Or that a change has taken place with the increased saturation of the media with celebrity culture? Or simply that different methodologies allow participants to express their ideas differently?
The book presents a broad and nuanced understanding of Estonia’s political situation, making it a worthwhile read for anyone with an interest in political affairs in the Baltic region. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the occupation (a contested term) by Russia officially ended, leaving – as Kaun explains – a large diaspora of ethnic Russians within Estonia whose position in society changed suddenly and dramatically. On this issue, Kaun presents a number of interesting findings. She reports that the majority of her participants communicated uncertainty about their knowledge of the other group, and that members of both groups were reluctant to label those of the other. She also states that interviewees with a mixed family background tended to identify as Estonian, rather than Estonian Russian (p. 102).
Further, participants tended to ascribe the continuing divide between Estonians and Estonian Russians to their exposure to different cultural resources (including mass media and education), which have endowed them with different accounts of historical events, rather than to inherent differences between the groups. Kaun notes that the different groups’ understandings of historical events are central to their divergent political accounts. This is particularly notable when the events that are considered important are agreed upon by both groups; it is only the interpretation of them that differs. It is also interesting that those participants who focused on conflict between Estonians and Estonian Russians were more lucid in their diagnoses of the causes of problems, but were less forthcoming when it came to suggesting solutions, seeing this as the role of the political sphere.
Kaun is meticulous in drawing attention to subtle differences in key terms in the existing literature as a way of clarifying her own focus. For example, she reviews different understandings of experience as a stream of happenings (Erfahrung) and as isolable episodes (Erlebnisse), and applies them to the types of civic experience her participants recount. The discrepancy between the possible meanings of ‘media’, however, could have been more clearly defined. While use of the umbrella term ‘media’ makes sense in terms of equating, for example, online and print newspapers, the difference in terms of the ability to influence content is discussed but not fully explored. Her use of online diaries as data also blurs these distinctions, as she sometimes uses ‘media’ to refer to her means of data collection and other times to talk about their contents.
The literature covered draws broadly and widely on many disciplines, to the point of being occasionally overwhelming. The book presents many key ideas, such as experience and narrative, action and orientation, and the dividing line between the civic and the non-civic. At the same time, the author never fully explains the framework used for coding and analysing patterns in the participants’ diaries. Occasional editing and typesetting errors make it difficult to follow parts of the theoretical discussion. Nevertheless, the author offers a useful starting point for scholars with an interest in understanding how individuals relate to their political environment, for students of youth culture and for those with an interest in the Baltic states and ethnic diasporas.