Communication and the crisis of democratic politics: a media project

• their political values;
• their cultural allegiances and attachments;
• the range of things that are appropriate topics for political discussion and action;
• the range of people who are legitimate political actors; and
• the institutional sites appropriate for political discussion and action.

Indeed we cannot any more assume common answers to those detailed questions after decades of feminist debate, shifts in the focus of political engagement, debates about what politics should be about. Such disagreements, however, can be seen as dependent upon a shared orientation to a public world (whose contents, precisely, they debate). Hence our attempt to focus our research on that underlying public connection.

Our question then is whether the assumption of public connection has any empirical basis, and if so what basis, in people's lives and actions, and particularly the uses, or not, they make of media? There are a range of specific reasons for putting this double assumption to the test in contemporary Britain:

• the fragmentation, perhaps, of people's attention to any public world (because of pressures of time from changing work patterns etc);
• the diminishing, quite possibly, of people's practical connection to institutions of political participation;
• the fragmentation, perhaps, of media consumption, across and within media, into multiple non-connecting 'sphericules' (as Todd Gitlin once put it); and
• whether these factors are as determining as some believe is what we want to understand.

So how are we trying to do this? Potentially this is a huge and long-term undertaking. For now, we are engaged in a more modest first stage: a detailed qualitative enquiry with around 30 subjects designed (through an open-ended diary form) to uncover the range of understandings they have of their 'public connection' (if any), and its links (if any) to their media consumption. While we start with the individual voice, we don't want to study the individual in isolation, hence our interest in following the trajectory of individuals' discussions of such issues with others, and conducting subsequent interviews and focus-groups that will track some of those discussions. Towards the end of our project we will do a national survey to generalise out some of the themes that emerge from the detailed qualitative work.

Our actual conclusions are of course some way in the future, but what type of conclusions in principle could we even now anticipate as interesting outcomes of this research? We are ready to find, for example, that:

• a number of people lack any sense of public connection (with some of them wanting things otherwise, and others wanting things to remain that way); or
• that while everyone we ask reports a sense of public connection, it is focussed on a range of public worlds which differ and may even be exclusive of each other (in terms of institutional site, scale, geographical focus - and let me stress that we do not assume that people's public world is necessarily national rather than local, national rather than global); or
• that there are a number of people for whom media consumption is less important than our second starting assumption claims (so for them 'public connection' is sustained through local groups, which meet face-to-face around agendas not reflected in media narratives); or
• that, for some people, their sense of public connection is pre-structured by larger forms of disconnection (racism, discrimination based on gender or sexuality, exile) - or, put the other way round, that the absence of such major factors of exclusion for others is what makes 'natural' their 'connection' to a public world. This is one of the clearest differences coming out of our preliminary interviews.

These points might not be surprising in the abstract, but what matters is to see how such constraints on connection are lived out in everyday experience, with or without media. And this, we would argue, is something that can only become visible through research whose chief emphasis is on deep qualitative methods, rather than surveys.