Abstract
Keeping media students in mind, Media Engagement incorporates a comprehensive understanding of media, culture, and democracy to introduce a fresh research viewpoint that examines engagement as a catalyst of power dynamics. Peter Dahlgren and Annette Hill, Professor Emeritus of Media and Communication at Lund University, Sweden, offer students and researchers varying tones of media engagement through decoding our meaningful relationship with media. Often defined as a research metric and a marketing technique to predict economic targets, the J&MC classrooms have witnessed empirical exploration of media engagement. However, the prevailing text sees the audiences with affective and emotional value rather than treating them as consumers vulnerable to manipulative algorithms. The book delivers the media engagement parameters, research tools, and theoretical framework for undergraduate and postgraduate media students and research scholars to develop a rational/cognitive orientation and subjective disposition.
The eight chapters of this book are distributed in three parts. The first part (Chapters 1 and 2) is about understanding media engagement. The theoretical glance toward media engagement describes it as a protean and processual factor and a “nexus of relations we make and break with traditional and alternative media on a daily basis” (p. 7). The authors highlight engagement as a relational process reinforcing citizens’ participation in society. However, participation is declared as a prerequisite or observational behavior before engagement.
In Chapter 2, Dahlgren and Hill have configured five parameters of media engagement. The aim is to seek the changing patterns and ways people engage and disengage with media. The parameters are media contexts, motivations, modalities, intensities, and consequences. The context here scans a broader media landscape. It can take multiple material or immaterial forms. To understand the source of engagement, motivations lead us to people’s intentions. Going further, the authors specify the affective and cognitive modalities. The affective modality invites emotions and sets the mood for the event. Conversely, cognitive modality prompts citizens or audiences to identify the core issues related to any problem to implement a solution. Intensities deal with time and duration. It showcases audiences’ short-term and long-term engagement with media content due to life events. In a broad social context, consequences will be unprecedented. They will be specific and multimodal. According to the authors, each parameter might portray a unique account; however, “together they create a tonal arrangement” (p. 34).
The second part (Chapters 3 and 4) further unfolds media and political engagement vectors. A brief look at the history of protest movements, such as the civil rights, anti-Vietnam war, and queer and feminist, enable authors to assert that the intensive audience engagement was mainly facilitated by mainstream journalism. In the pre-social media era, societal communication occurred through newspapers, magazines, and radio stations. At the same time, protests like the Arab Spring were entirely conceived through social media in recent times. Irrespective of the missing unitary link to connect the various interests of citizens, the world has experienced vast and heterogeneous social mobility. While explaining the logic of disengagement, the authors are concerned that “there is no clear link between having mediated public connection and any sense of political efficacy” (p. 59). Accepting the polarized political climate, the authors strongly sensed the personalization of engagement influenced by individual values, constructing a new pathway for large-scale political and cultural engagement. However, this notion is equally responsible for disengagement as people’s cynical and pessimistic views toward politics.
Continuing this debate, the authors redirect our attention to the distinct modes of engagement in the public sphere while stressing civic cultures and cultural citizenship. The political public sphere consists of communicative spaces (media). With fluid identities and a vast array of interactional constellations, political engagement is driven by emotional energies rather than purely rational thought. However, we must recognize the contingencies and hindrances people face while participating as political agents. That is where civic culture helps us to perceive the pathway for engagement. Media, undoubtedly, plays a crucial role in generating knowledge, facilitating information flows and values, and building trust. However, in the transnational and online era, media environments could be altered and evolve continuously, making the engagement nexus challenging to predict. Hence, while discussing the three fundamental sets of media contingencies, the authors cite that the online environment is not neutral and is “structured by power relations between the tech giants and users” (p. 84). The book suggests that influential power structures shape social reality, public opinion, and lived experiences. Since emotionality is taking over factual evidence and rational thinking, the manipulative algorithm logic of social media authorizes the engagement culture. This is a challenge for mainstream journalism and democracies around the world.
The third part (Chapters 5–8) applies media engagement parameters in real-life scenarios. These chapters help students to examine the operationalization of the proposed framework. The authors have demonstrated five parameters in Malaysian, Vietnamese, and Belarusian contexts. The news and audience analysis were conducted during the global COVID-19 pandemic, which was already testing the ethicalities of digital journalism. Drawing upon the 30 interviews (interview guide is developed with sub-questions and prompts reflecting media engagement parameters as themes) of millennials from different backgrounds exposed to mainstream and alternative digital news feeds, the authors conceive a few significant observations regarding news engagement – (a) Instead of people searching for news, the news is finding people. They are surrounded by news, resulting in disengagement and irritation. (b) The distrust in news media is growing, especially during the pandemic. News has lost its meaning and value among audiences. (c) The news exchange within family structures is responsible for the verification of facts as well as the spreading of rumors. The above conclusions imply the negation of news. However, negation means lacking something meaningful or valuable in this context. In other words, the untrustworthiness of news worries citizens about their disengagement with it. Ultimately, their concerns mean intense and wide-ranging news engagement by audiences.
The book is a valuable addition to the media and communication classroom discussions. It brings an innovative approach to generate a relevant meaning of engagement that can cover a wide range of circumstances that are sometimes diverse, overlapping, and have complex linkages. The theoretical framework motivates students to find the interlinks between engagement and power structures or relations with the affective dimension. In all, media engagement is a challenging read. Familiarity with Dahlgren and Hill’s previous work would make this reading more insightful. Undoubtedly, Media Engagement has spurred fruitful conversations in media pedagogy.
