457141

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CUS0010.1177/1749975512457141Cultural SociologyInthorn et al.

Article
Cultural Sociology
7(3) 336­–351
Popular Culture as a Resource © The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/1749975512457141
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Sanna Inthorn, John Street

and Martin Scott
University of East Anglia, UK

Abstract
Based on focus groups and interviews with first-time voters in the UK, this study reflects critically
on the role of popular culture as a resource of political engagement. Unlike previous studies,
it looks at a wide range of popular culture and suggests that entertainment television, video
games and popular music provide young citizens with some of the resources they need actively
to engage in the public sphere. Young citizens struggle to see the relevance of formal politics in
their everyday lives, yet they see themselves as part of a political community and connect with its
concerns. They use media texts to learn about social and political issues and to explore the moral
values that underpin the society in which they live. While some critics have suggested that the
media disconnect citizens from their communities, the findings of this study suggest that media
texts are a resource which prepares young people for their engagement in the public sphere.

Keywords
music, political engagement, politics, popular culture, television, young people, youth,
video games

Introduction
This paper contributes to an an emerging field of scholarship which seeks to take seri-
ously the role of popular culture in strengthening, rather than undermining, political
engagement. The role of news media in providing a platform for debate about matters of
public importance is well established (Livingstone and Markham, 2008: 360), and in
recent years the role of entertainment media too has become acknowledged. Instead of
distracting from serious politics and civic engagement, it seems that satirical talk shows
offer audiences the possibility of ‘meaningful engagement with the political process’

Corresponding author:
Sanna Inthorn, School of Political, Social and International Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4
7TJ, UK.
Email: s.inthorn@uea.ac.uk
Inthorn et al. 337

(Jones, 2006: 367). The reading of detective fiction has become identified as a political
cultural practice and a domain in which readers ‘deploy a sense of self and of identity’,
of their ‘place in society’, the obligations they have and the rights that are due to them
(Hermes and Stello, 2000: 219). Popular culture, it has been argued, is an authoritative
source of cues about the relevance of political and social issues and offers scripts which
audiences, and young people in particular, use to play at being citizens. Through popular
culture young people ‘play-act their way not only into the web of power relations that
constitute personal identity but also into the disciplines and values of larger entities’
(Barnhurst, 1999: 207). With this paper we want to broaden the scope of current analysis
in this field. Existing research tends to be more concerned with overall patterns of media
consumption than audience engagement with specific media texts and their modes of
delivery (Livingstone and Markham, 2008). Studies that do look at individual texts and
genres (Jones, 2005) focus on texts that are still quite explicitly about politics in the tra-
ditional sense. By contrast, in our study we wanted to ask whether media texts that do not
make explicit references to formal politics have the potential to provide young people
with the resources they need for political engagement.
The research reported here is part of a wider project which, through a combination of
focus groups, interviews and textual analysis, aims to discern the particular ways in
which young people use different forms of popular culture to connect with issues of
public concern. In this paper we are particularly concerned with the results of our audi-
ence research, which included focus groups and interviews with pupils in the UK. We
talked to our respondents about a wide range of television genres, including talent shows,
soap operas, drama, news and documentaries. We witnessed conversations about popular
music and video games, two forms of popular culture whose relationship to politics is
less frequently explored than that of television. The focus on these media forms makes
sense because of the central role they play in young people’s everyday lives. People
between the ages of 16 and 24 watch over 18 hours of television every week (Ofcom,
2006). Additionally, 71 per cent regularly listen to music and 47 per cent regularly play
computer games (Ofcom, 2009: 7). Claims for the political nature of popular music form
part of what might almost be described as a conventional wisdom (see Eyerman and
Jamison, 1998; Mattern, 1998), but to date there is relatively little empirical evidence on
which to ground these claims. Similarly, while the potential of digital games as stimuli
for learning and development of social roles has been recognized (see McFarlane et al.,
2002: 13; Gee, 2003), there is no large-scale study available which asks whether video
games have the potential to be a resource young people can use for political engagement.
Our research participants were between 16 and 17 years old. This age-group is of particu-
lar interest as

even though there is a lack of clear and reliable evidence for a decline in young people’s
participation at general elections, there is a definite perception among journalists, researchers,
politicians and others that the extent of young, first-time voter non-participation is now higher
than ever before. (Kimberlee, 2002: 86)

Implicit in this public perception of young people as apolitical is the assumption that
voting is an activity by which we can measure the extent to which someone is politically
338 Cultural Sociology 7(3)

engaged. It is a traditional approach which defines political engagement as trying to

influence or otherwise engaging with the institutions and principles by which a political
community is governed (Linde and Ekman, 2003: 394). This can include institutions of
the state but also civil society organizations, or what has been referred to as ‘third sector’
organizations (Kendall, 2000). If in our study we were to work with this ideal type of
political engagement we would have to agree with the findings of other researchers who
have suggested that young people are disconnected from politics (Fahmy, 2003). The
following example illustrates what emerged across the majority of interviews and focus
groups. For our respondents, formal politics is a world of which they feel they know little
and to which they have little to contribute:

Interviewer: G. said he is not interested in politics, is that true for everybody?

G: 1 Pretty much.

D: Boring.
A: At the moment.
B: I don’t know if it’s boring or not, I’ve just never got into it.
E: Yeah.
F: I can’t judge it really. …
C: Politics is stressful. Everyone is constantly trying to win each other over all the time.
E: It’s confusing.
B: To be honest I don’t think any of us really know anything about politics.
A: No I don’t.
(Focus group 3)

Respondents described formal politics as difficult to comprehend, dominated by a

combative mode of communication, and as a domain or concern for people older than
our respondents. As we have argued elsewhere in more detail, our respondents perceive
politics as a world in which expertise and authority are signalled in very conventional
ways. The picture of a successful politician that emerged across focus groups and inter-
views was one of a serious, argumentative and mature person (Inthorn and Street, 2011).
Our respondents clearly feel distant from politics in the traditional sense of the word and
do not engage in the kinds of activities that are traditionally considered to be important
for democracy.
Yet as others have demonstrated, just because young people may be disengaged from
formal politics and live lives deeply emersed in popular culture, that does not necessarily
mean that they are apolitical (Buckingham, 1999; Barnhurst, 1998). Moreover, the cul-
tural forms that young people seem to enjoy and are comfortable with do not necessarily
limit the extent to which young people are politically engaged. In our study we wanted
to do both: to take seriously the potential of popular culture to be a resource young peo-
ple can use to engage in politics, and to be open to the possibility that political engage-
ment can mean other things than voting or writing a letter to one’s Member of Parliament.
In order to do so we had to take something of an epistemological leap. We had to assume
that content which does not make explicit references to formal politics might also be
understood as ‘political’ and be a valuable resource for political engagement. We also
had to assume that activities that once might have been considered ‘unpolitical’ may in
Inthorn et al. 339

fact be forms of political engagement, or at least an early manifestation of such engage-

ment. In the following paragraphs we will outline this approach in more detail.

Defining Politics and Political Engagement

Along similar lines to Nash (2001) we argue that politics involves the contestation of
relations of power and is an inherent aspect of all social relations (Nash, 2001: 84),
including the public and the private sphere. Feminist scholars have applied this approach
to the analyses of media use in the home, demonstrating the ways in which the routine
interaction of couples can be seen as ‘a systematic re-creation and reinforcement of
social pattern’ through which ‘women and men are creating and affirming themselves
and each other as separate and unequal’ (Walker, 1996: 820). Once we accept the premise
that politics manifests itself at the micro-level of everyday life, we can widen the range
of cultural and social practices which become the subjects of our analysis. It becomes
possible to explore the ways in which the seemingly mundane, such as a dispute over
what to watch on TV (Walker, 1996), or a woman’s choice of hairstyle (Weitz, 2001), is
a negotiation of power.
We recognize that this approach has been criticized for rendering the concept of poli-
tics meaningless. Fiske’s reading of youths hanging around shopping malls as ‘urban
guerillas’ (Fiske, 1998), for example, has been criticized as an example of ‘decorative
sociology’, which is characterized by ‘over-politicized readings of cultural life’ (Rojek
and Turner, 2000: 637). Central to such criticism, it seems to us, is the concern that
researchers fail to demonstrate how the cultural practices they observe are connected to
politics in the traditional sense of the word; that is, the institutions and policies that
govern people’s lives. Like Nash (2001), we do not suggest that the state is irrelevant to
politics. We also want to retain boundaries between actions or statements that are politi-
cal and those that are not. The key lies in the extent to which actions are connected with
wider structures of power, which may include but are not exclusive to those exercised
by the state (Nash, 2000: 85). In order for a verbal or non-verbal action to be political
it needs to have an element of public orientation. We find this idea in the work of
Couldry et al. (2007), who use the concept of ‘public connectedness’ for their definition
of political engagement. Public connection captures ‘an orientation to any of those
issues affecting how we live together that require common resolution’ (Couldry et al.,
2007: 6). This definition demarcates non-political issues from political ones. Political
issues affect large sections of society and require collective action. Non-political ones
do not (Couldry et al., 2007: 6). This does mean that experiences which a traditional and
narrow definition of politics would identify as non-political can in fact be considered as
political. An example would be a woman who complains to her husband about his habit
of hogging the remote control and who makes the family’s television viewing habits
part of a wider argument about gender. It is because she is referring to wider social
structures and has identified a public issue that requires collective action that her state-
ment is political.
There are many ways in which a person can make a connection with an issue of public
concern. Engagement in government and network politics is recognized by many writers
as a contribution to the public sphere (Castells, 2010; Ingelhart and Norris, 2003; Putnam,
340 Cultural Sociology 7(3)

2000). Yet just as we want to argue that there is more than one way of conceptualizing
politics, in this study we want to suggest that there is more than one way of engaging in
politics. Actions that seemingly have very little conection with formal politics may
indeed be a form of political engagement. We are particuarly interested in exploring the
argument put forward by writers like Livingstone (2005), who suggest that talk, even in
its smallest and tentative forms, may prepare us for participation in the public sphere:
‘We need an account of the formation of public opinion and of citizens – early expres-
sions of interest, exploration of experience, tentative trying out of viewpoints. This may
not happen in the public sphere but the public sphere depends on its happening’
(Livingstone, 2005: 28–9). Taking this idea on board, we argue that if in their everyday
conversations young people talk about something as an issue of public concern, then we
can say that they are engaging in politics.
Yet in this study we want to do more than find out if young people are engaging in
politics when talking. We are particularly concerned with the ways in which popular
culture might help young people to engage in politics. In short, we want to explore
whether popular culture can provide the ‘fuel’ that is necessary to engage in politics. In
order to do so, we draw on the work of Dahlgren and others who have highlighted how
someone who engages in politics has certain capacities. Much of this work is about and
uses the terms ‘citizenship’ and ‘civic engagement’, which are commonly understood to
be activities which pertain to the democratic character of society (Dahlgren, 2009: 59).
The term ‘political engagement’, in contrast, tends to imply some dimensions of conflict
and captures any activity that is ‘oriented toward influencing government action in some
way’ (Dahlgren, 2009: 59), including potentially anti-democratic ones. While we take
inspiration from work that focuses on civic engagement, we work with a broad concept
of politics and political engagement, which is why in our study we use the term political
engagement rather than civic engagement.

What Is Necessary for Political Engagement?

We agree with writers such as Dahlgren who argue that democracy resides in ‘the
interaction of citizens with each other and with power-holders of various kind’
(Dahlgren, 2006: 274). Central to this approach is the idea that political engagement is
informed by knowledge (Dahlgren, 2006: 275). The role of the media is to provide the
balanced and diverse range of information that is necessary in order to form rational
opinions (Barnett, 2002: 400; McNair, 2000: 197). One form of such knowledge
relates to the actions of political and social elites. The media act as a watchdog, hold-
ing to account those in power (McNair, 2008: 239) and providing the resources an
individual may need to develop a relationship with sources of power in society
(Buckingham, 1999). Yet the media’s role is not limited to that of moral guardian or
watchdog. Drawing on cultural citizenship theory, we argue that political engagement
involves a willingness to encounter, recognize and accept cultural diversity (Stevenson,
2001: 2). The media help facilitate encounters with this diversity of interests
(Buckingham, 1999). Numerous studies have documented how media discourse con-
structs concepts of, for example, gender (Ferguson, 1983; Crewe, 2003), sexuality
(Arthus, 2004), race (Downing, 2006) and class (Lawler, 2005).
Inthorn et al. 341

It is through the dialogue of identities that a political community establishes and re-
appropriates the norms that bind it and by which it is governed (Benhabib, 2006: 49–
50). Having such values is another key element of political participation. As Dahlgren
(2009: 110) says, democracy ‘will not function if such virtues as tolerance and willing-
ness to follow democratic principles and procedures do not have grounding in everyday
life’. Crucially, these values do not refer exclusively to institutional frameworks.
Democracy ‘is as much about a democratic society – how people live together and treat
each other – as it is about a system of institutional frameworks’ (Dahlgren, 2009: 112).
Many writers stress the importance of tolerance as a collective political value. However,
as Livingstone (2005: 25) points out, this emphasis privileges an ideal type of demo-
cratic culture. The definition of politics that we use in our study certainly means that we
could interpret a sexist statement as a political act. If, going back to our example of the
couple on the sofa, the husband told his wife that women should not be in charge of
technology because they are natural carers and allowing them to take control over
machines threatens the institutions of family and marriage, we may not like what he
says, but we would have to recognize that he has identified a collective value by which,
in his opinion at least, society should be governed. In this study, when we speak of
political values we refer to those values that envision how the members of a given
society should relate to each other.
The resources that fuel political engagement do not need to be rational. Political
engagement also has a subjective side. Traditionally, liberal democratic theory has
dismissed the role of emotions in politics. Yet more recently, scholars have returned to
this issue and have argued that emotions are central to democratic politics and may
even motivate political action (Marcus et al., 2000; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2008; van Zoonen,
2004). In our study we are particularly interested in those kinds of emotions that make
individuals associate with the interests of often distant others, which is what Dahlgren
(2003: 159) calls ‘affinity’. Citizenship theory speaks of civic solidarity or ‘we con-
sciousness’ and citizens’ sense of in- and outsiders (Tambakaki, 2009: 11). In our study,
when we speak of expressions of ‘affinity’, we refer to moments in which someone
expresses a sense of group membership that extends beyond their immediate personal
context. Political engagement may be motivated by a sense of connectedness with dis-
tant others on the grounds of a (possible imagined) shared set of characteristics. We
find a similar idea in Anderson’s (1991) work on the ‘imagined community’ of the
nation, which describes a horizontal comradeship that is felt and articulated by people
who are and are likely to remain strangers to each other.
In summary, we identify knowledge, collective values and affinity as essential pre-
conditions of political engagement. Young people may have the preconditions we
have identified, but they may not always put them to use. A young person may feel
affinity towards distant others, but might never act on these feelings. Our research
focuses on the essential preconditions of political participation and we did not set out
to test the correlation between evidence of young people having knowledge, affinity
or values and the whole range of their political activities. Yet we do not deny that
there is an active dimension to political engagement. As Dahlgren notes: ‘political
participation is more than a feeling one has, it involves some “activity”’ (Dahlgren,
2009: 81).
342 Cultural Sociology 7(3)

Traditionally, citizenship theory has tended to emphasize the public orientation of

such an activity. Participation in national, cross-class, face-to-face, chapter-based organi-
zations of civil society, such as occupational associations or veterans’ organizations, are
often held up as the ideal form of political participation (Schudson, 2006: 594). Without
wanting to reject the political potential of these activities, in our research we focus on the
role of talk and its contribution to the politics of the public sphere. We want to suggest
that the exchange of viewpoints on which the public sphere and political participation
depend may start in the private sphere (Livingstone, 2005: 28–9). This argument is
reflected in our decision to analyse young people’s conversations about popular culture,
but it also shows in the way in which we sought to structure these conversations. We
invited our respondents to talk to us about times when they were engaged in conversa-
tions about popular culture, but we also aimed to start these conversataions ourselves
within the setting of interviews and focus groups.

Methodology
We conducted 13 semi-structured 30-minute focus groups of four to seven participants
each, followed up by 26 in-depth interviews with pupils in the UK counties of Norfolk,
Suffolk and Essex. Our participants were 16 to 17 years old. We opted for a qualitative
research methodology which can be more sensitive than a quantitative study to the
complexities and details of how people think about their connections to the public
sphere (Couldry et al., 2007). Focus groups allowed us to prompt answers while at the
same time giving respondents the opportunity to engage with each other’s ideas.
Interviews were useful tools to explore in more depth the patterns suggested by our
focus group data. We started all our conversations by asking respondents to identify the
media texts they liked best and why. In focus groups these questions often led to a
debate among participants about the quality of a particular media text, which meant we
were also able to gather data on the cultural categorizations of our respondents.
Working with these examples we then moved on to explore how social and political
groups and issues are depicted in the media and whether these had ever instigated
action by our respondents. While we tried to make participants’ cultural tastes central
to our study, we did ask them to talk about factual television and reality television
programmes. We did this in recognition of previous studies’ emphasis on the potential
of these media texts as sources of political learning (Livingstone and Markham, 2008)
and of the experience of public engagement (Coleman, 2003). Further, we prompted
answers on political engagement and feelings of political efficacy, to help us contextu-
alize respondents’ engagement with the political meanings of media and to ascertain
whether respondents were engaged in any political activities of the traditional kind.
The number of focus groups and interviews was large enough for us to reach saturation
of data after approximately two-thirds of the focus groups and interviews had been
completed.
Before we can go on to present the findings of our research, however, we need to
acknowledge the limitations of our study: We recruited participants with the help of their
sixth-form teachers and relied on a convenience sample of geographically close schools,
which had agreed to participate in our study. This approach produced a sample which,
Inthorn et al. 343

while balanced in terms of gender, consisted predominantly of participants who came

from white British backgrounds. Furthermore, the catchment areas of all the schools
were generally middle-class. This meant that the responses we gathered did not allow us
to explore fully the extent to which experiences of social marginalization other than by
age or gender may impact on young people’s engagement with popular culture and its
political meanings. While the role of such socio-political differences is an important
question for future research, with our project we aimed to pursue a more basic but no less
fundamental question. Before investigating how social identities such as gender or race
impact on the ways in which young people use popular culture as a resource for political
engagement, our research asks whether popular culture can ever be such a resource in the
first place.

Knowledge, Collective Values and Affinity

Many of the young people we talked to showed that they valued knowledge by attaching
importance to learning. What this means in practice is complex and sometimes
contradictory:

D: What? Don’t you care about what’s going on?

A: No I do.
D: Don’t you want to know what’s going on?
A: I don’t know, I just, like, when I turn on the news it’s really boring and they are always
behind desks and they are like looking into the camera … don’t know, it’s not interesting
if they are saying it but if my friend is saying it.
D: No, but if you just watch it, you probably haven’t even listened to what they say, you have
to watch it for more than like 5 minutes to actually know what’s going on.
(Focus group 13)

This tension between the values and pleasures of watching the news occurred fre-
quently across focus groups. Watching the news and finding out, as one respondent put
it, ‘what’s going on’ for many is something they see as important. They even criticized
others for not seeing the point in gathering this kind of knowledge about the world, and
measured the extent to which someone cares about the world by their willingness to
learn.
However, only a few respondents described themselves as interested in news pro-
grammes and none declared an interest in the news without being prompted. Yet, un-
prompted by us, many respondents expressed an appreciation of opportunities to gain
knowledge about institutions of power and the experiences of diverse social groups in
fictional narratives, such as soap operas. Even when they rejected media content for not
being what they described as a true reflection of the real, these young people suggested
that they use the media to reflect on issues of public concern:

A: There is not really like a mix of ages or anything [in Hollyoaks2] so it is all like kids. And
they portray them as being like really horrible.
B: But that’s the point though.
A: Yeah, but not all kids are like that. And I think they give it a really bad …
344 Cultural Sociology 7(3)

B: Do you think? I don’t think it’s like that at all – it’s a really wide span of people. What was
that Hannah who had the whole eating disorder thing and Amy who has got the domestic
violence with Steve.
C: And college is meant to be aimed at young people and it’s not like it’s deliberately not
having all different age groups from like uni students downwards and I think it’s really
good for people of our age to see things like the anorexia, drug use and teenage pregnancies.
Basically everything.
(Focus group 1)

What this exchange shows is that while some of our respondents rejected the mode of
presentation of some programmes and soap operas in particular, they nevertheless recog-
nized that fictional narratives are a potential source of learning. Moreover, they identi-
fied issues that they deemed to be of relevance for a wider collectivity. In the last example,
anorexia, drug use and teenage pregnancy were identified as issues that young people
ought to know about.
In their talk about popular culture, our participants identified issues of public con-
cern, but they also discussed how these issues ought to be dealt with by society as a
whole. For example, a discussion about the judges on the television talent audition
show Britain’s Got Talent led to an exchange about the acceptable way to treat
children:

A: I don’t like it on stuff like Britain’s Got Talent3 now – I don’t like it when he [Simon
Cowell] is nasty to kids though.
B: If they have talent then you shouldn’t be horrible to them – they should go on there.
A: But no, they are kids and you don’t know.
B: No, no, no.
C: They shouldn’t be treated differently just because of their age.
A: Yes they should.
B: No they shouldn’t – if they haven’t got talent.
A: If you’ve got an 8 year old on there who thinks he can sing and his parents are too stupid
to tell him that he can’t – then standing out on stage and [judge] Simon [Cowell] is like
yelling at him. …
…
B: But he tells adults as well and I don’t see why it should be any different if they’re a child.
A: But adults can take it.
(Focus group 1)

Exchanges likes this demonstrate that our respondents are grappling with notions
of responsibility towards strangers. These young people clearly explored the question
of how people should treat each other and they sought to apply a set of values to a
community of people which included people whom they might never meet. They
made the question of how adults should treat children an issue of wider public
concern.
Discussions about one’s responsibility towards strangers cropped up in particular
whenever conversations turned to the topic of video games. Many identified the oppor-
tunity to challenge social norms and to act in immoral ways as a pleasure they derive
from gaming:
Inthorn et al. 345

C: It sounds really bad, but it’s really fun killing The Sims. Because, like if you put them in a
room with like a fireplace and take out the door then they can’t get out and the fire …
[Laughing]
(Focus group 2)

The ability to control and even kill characters in The Sims is clearly identified as one
of the pleasures of the game. However, this pleasure is not revealed without the signal
that murder is understood as morally wrong. In conversations about the pleasures of
violent games our respondents made a distinction between the ‘real’, where social
norms apply, and the ‘unreal’ or imaginary, where they do not. In making this distinc-
tion, our respondents maintain that in the ‘real world’, there should be certain principles
that govern people’s behaviour towards others. Moreover, they signalled that they sub-
scribe to these principles themselves. To us this is evidence that when talking about
popular culture our respondents express their political values. Our respondents’ answers
suggest they use the media to gather knowledge about the world they live in, to encoun-
ter unfamiliar social identities and playfully to explore the principles that govern how
people live together. To us these were moments when, in talking about popular culture,
our participants built up and worked through some of what we have identified as key
preconditions of political engagement.
Earlier in this paper we suggested that at moments when young people consider their
social responsibility towards others, or when they express an interest in the experiences
of diverse social groups, they may be motivated by feelings of affinity. A young person
might express these feelings by vocalizing an interest in the lives of others, but inherent
in this interest is a sense that their life and their interests are somehow connected with
those of others. We suggest that political engagement may be informed by the feeling of
belonging to a wider collectivity. The role of popular culture here is twofold: It offers the
feeling of being represented, but also of feeling part of a wider collectivity and its shared
cultural practices.
When describing what popular culture means to them, some respondents expressed a
strong sense of cultural identity and belonging. In the following example, our respond-
ents strongly identify with Asian culture and describe music as central to the expression
of their ethno-cultural identity:

Interviewer: Do you think your music tells people something about yourself?
B: I think they do.
A: Yeah.
B: Because, like you get some people who are Asian but they don’t listen to Asian
music so you know they are not as …
A: In touch with their culture.
B: Yeah.
(Focus group 4)

As this last example illustrates, some of our respondents expressed a sense of con-
nectedness with others by talking about particular cultural practices. Others expressed
this feeling by referring to a concept of a collectively shared ‘homeland’, as the follow-
ing exchange about public voting on talent reality shows reveals:
346 Cultural Sociology 7(3)

B: And everyone goes on the fact of where that person comes from, if you get
someone from Newcastle, like if someone was from Norwich and even if I didn’t
know them, I probably would vote for them just because it would be great.
A: Just because they are from Norwich.
Interviewer: Would you? Why?
D: They’re from Norwich.
B: Just because they are from Norwich, I mean, why not. If they won, we would end
up holding, it’s nothing like about pride of Norwich, it’s just the fact that they are
from Norwich. Like everyone was fascinated by that one off Big Brother4, what
was his name? Craig? Just because he was from Sheringham.
(Focus group 6)

When our respondents constructed their sense of self in this way, they did not explic-
itly talk about citizenship. However, they imagined the geographic as well as the cultural
foundations of their community and they placed themselves within it. In this way many
expressed a sense of belonging to Norfolk, Essex and Suffolk, the counties in which they
live. To us such statements have a clear public dimension and suggest that popular cul-
ture offers our participants ways into developing and strengthening a sense of connected-
ness with other members of a public community. While the last example appears to
illustrate their affinity to people from specific geographic areas, the following extract
from a discussion about comedy illustrates another key theme that emerged in many
focus groups and interviews in which respondents drew on a discourse of national iden-
tity. Mapping the world into distinct cultural collectivities, they distinguished between a
cultural Self and Other:

A: Yeah, some of the jokes as well, especially when they make jokes about some kind of
person that obviously us in Britain don’t really know about because for like Americans they,
and I’m sure some things in Eastenders5 they won’t understand because they don’t know
the kind of, they don’t live in the country. (Interview 23)

Respondents who drew the boundaries of their communities in this way appeared to
work with a traditional mapping of the world in which local identity and nation matter
most. Yet in some conversations the young people we spoke to also expressed a sense of
connectedness with a wider global community. For some of our respondents media rep-
resentations of human suffering in televised fundraising events like Comic Relief6 invited
them to express affinity with distant others:

A: Yeah, I always ring up. Like in Comic Relief when they have the little bits about like the
children suffering and things like that, it makes me feel like guilty, like I don’t really do
much, I usually ring up. (Interview 8)

Telethons such as Comic Relief of course have been criticized for proffering the
notion that charitable acts are a solution to social and political problems (Devereux,
1996: 48), and also for offering audiences the role of the powerful benign figure that
helps the relatively powerless (Devereux, 1996: 64–5). It can be argued that telethons
sanction a collective gazing at people who are already politically and economically
Inthorn et al. 347

marginalized (Longmore, 2005). Yet while it is important to recognize that this particu-
lar television form may offer a problematic approach to issues such as international
development and poverty, popular cultural texts such as telethons need to be recognized
for the ways in which they may offer moments that invite audiences to take into account
‘the rest of humanity’ (Szerszynski and Urry, 2006: 116–17). In the last example from
one of our interviews, our respondents clearly indicated that images of starving children
on television make them connect with these children and their concerns. This moment
of connectedness may be brief, but it is there nevertheless.

Using the Resources for Citizenship for Political

Engagement?
Picking up the phone and donating money may not in the eyes of some be a particularly
significant form of political action. As we suggested in the introduction to this paper, we
recognize that for many writers (e.g. Putnam, 2000) political engagement is more than
watching Comic Relief. However, in our study we wanted to take seriously the political
potential of what Livingstone (2005: 28–9) calls ‘early expressions of interest, explora-
tion of experience, tentative trying out of viewpoints’. Talk helps young people to iden-
tify and think through issues of public concern and, as Livingstone (2005) suggests, this
activity should be taken seriously for the way in which it might help prepare young
people for their participation in the politics of the public sphere. The artificial setting of
an interview or focus group cannot recreate moments of such exchange as they happen
in everyday life. Yet our set of qualitative data suggests that at least some of our respond-
ents engage in such talk among themselves:

Interviewer: Do you ever talk to your friends about lyrics?

A: All the time! I’m annoyed because I’m always like, ‘listen to it properly’ and
what you think?’ Because I always try and relate it to my life because I’m really
sad, but yeah, always, we’re always talk[ing] about it, me and the girls, not so
much with my boyfriends as such but if we’re talking about something, especially
because we’re like, if we’ve got problems we just sit in class and like, ‘listen to
this song, how much does it remind you of it’ and it just makes you even sadder.
But we always talk about lyrics and think.
(Interview 14)

What examples like this indicate is that by talking about the meanings of a media
text, young people may engage each other in conversations about political issues. The
politics of this dialogue may not always be explicitly about institutions of the state or
political parties, but as we have argued throughout this paper, talk about the interest of
social groups and how they live together is talk about political issues. Media texts that
traditionally are not considered to stimulate political engagement, such as a pop song or
a video game, stimulate these exchanges of ideas. Future research can reveal the fre-
quency with which such exchanges actually take place in young people’s lives and
whether they ever lead to political engagement in the traditional sense. Yet our findings
are sufficient to show that in order to grasp the many different ways in which young
348 Cultural Sociology 7(3)

people may be politically engaged, we need to take seriously the possibility that media
texts that are primarily designed for entertainment and diversion may engage young
people in conversations about political issues, which to us is an important political
activity.

Conclusion
Many young people feel disconnected from formal politics and struggle to see the
connection between formal politics and their own lives. Yet such apathy should not
be mistaken for indifference. In our study even young people who expressed a lack
of interest in government politics engaged in conversations about social responsibil-
ity and the interests of diverse social groups. It was talk about popular culture that
stimulated these conversations. Our findings suggest that popular culture can provide
young people with key resources they need to engage in politics. From our study it
seems also clear that, for many, thinking through the meaning of what they see and
hear in popular culture is not always a solitary experience. Discussion is a political
activity and the young people in our study seem often to engage in talk with each
other. Rather than leading young citizens to ‘bowl alone’ (Putnam, 2000), popular
culture provides them with at least some of the resources they need to actively engage
in the public sphere, even if those are conventionally not understood as political.
While we feel that our study lends further support to the argument that popular culture
can help people to engage in politics, at the same time we want to add a note of caution.
Our study echoes the findings of others who have argued that young people remain alien-
ated from formal politics. Much of this perception of formal politics and political partici-
pation may be mediated itself (Buckingham 1999: 176). Social and political elites with
the resources to produce strong and effective PR still dominate news reporting (Lewis
et al., 2008; Davis, 2000; Allan, 1999: 70–75), and in news reporting at least, members
of the public rarely feature as active contributors to the policy-making process (Lewis et
al., 2005). Our data does not allow us to make any strong claims about the extent to
which such experiences of powerlessness stem from encounters with media representa-
tions of political activism in fictional narratives. However, given that young people use
popular culture to explore the geographic and cultural (including normative) boundaries
of their political community and to identify issues of public concern, it seems plausible
to suggest that representations of political activism not only in the news, but in entertain-
ment television, popular music and video games, may end up undermining its potential
to invigorate the public sphere.

Acknowledgement
We gratefully acknowledge funding from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council
(RES-000-22-2700).

Notes
1. Letters in interview data refer to different speakers.
2. A long-running soap opera broadcast on Channel 4.
3. A talent show, broadcast on ITV.
Inthorn et al. 349

4. The British version of the Dutch reality television format. At the time of writing Big Brother
was broadcast on Channel 4.
5. Broadcast on BBC One, Eastenders is one of the UK’s longest running television soap operas.
6. A charity telethon, broadcast by BBC One and BBC Two.

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Author biographies
Sanna Inthorn is Lecturer of Society, Culture and Media at the University of East Anglia. She is
author of German Media and National Identity and co-author of Citizens or Consumers: What the
Media Tell Us About Political Participation.
John Street is Professor of Politics at the University of East Anglia. Among his books are Mass
Media, Politics and Democracy, Politics and Popular Culture and Rebel Rock: The Politics of
Popular Music.
Martin Scott is Lecturer in Media and International Development at the University of East Anglia.
He is author of Screening the World: How the UK Broadcasters Portrayed the Wider World in
2007–8 and The World in Focus: How Audiences Connect with the Wider World.