Stratified Citizens: Conceptualizing Civic Capital in Mediatized Societies

Abstract

While there are many ways to understand citizenship in terms of what constituents (should) do, think, feel, and say, there is a felt absence of a perspective that factors in the social reasons for how people enact citizenship and the role of media in enacting such forms of citizenship. Based on a review of key studies of citizenship in audience research and political science, this study introduces a Bourdieusian perspective to examine citizenship in mediatized societies. We argue for two main advantages to this approach. First, it cuts across scholarly silos and scrutinizes the civic habitus of people as it unfolds across both mediated and non-mediated life. Citizenship is thus seen as a complex interplay of online and offline practices that vary for agents across the social space. Second, this approach is attentive to dimensions of social inequality and power, emphasizing how the many citizenship practices in the modern era are situated in a vertically stratified social world with a distinct symbolic order. Linking this to the concepts of symbolic power and dominance, we develop the notion of civic capital to illuminate how certain forms of citizenship practices, mostly those available to the affluent strata, are elevated as correct expressions of legitimate citizenship, whereas others are frowned upon.