Geoscience Reference
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in number, poorly resourced or invisible - goods such as public schools,
toll-free highways or universal healthcare.
Mediated publicness: the mass media as public resource and
public threat
What's all this got to do with the mass media? Whereas involvement in
civil society organisations is typically local and face-to-face, membership
of publics is, for reasons already mentioned, virtual. Quite simply, a pub-
lic cannot exist without the technologies of mass communication (and it's
worth noting here the etymological connection between 'communication'
and 'community'). In the words of media analyst Mike Schafer,
The mass media constitute
the
most important forum for the public sphere
in modern societies, providing an organising framework for societal self-
observation, allowing a large number of citizens to inform themselves about
political, economic and other developments.
(Schafer, 2010: 1, emphasis added)
For a strong public sphere to exist, it's necessary, but not sufficient, to
have an active civil society. For citizens to have sufficient knowledge of and
be able to make informed judgements about issues of public concern, the
mass media has to perform the first of its three functions to a high standard.
Representations disseminated as 'news', 'current affairs', journalism and doc-
umentaries are especially important here. This is why one commentator talks
of the 'mass media public sphere' (Downey, 2007: 118) in order to signify
the indissociable link between mass mediation and the very existence of 'the
public', 'public affairs' and 'public debates'. Echoing this, media analyst John
Hartley once opined that 'the public can nowadays
only
be encountered in
mediated form
...
' (Hartley, 1992: 1, emphasis added). This means that a
lot of 'politics' today, in both the narrow and broader senses of the word, is
played out in and through the mass media. To quote John Thompson once
again, echoing Paul Watson,
To achieve visibility through the [mass] media is to gain a kind of presence
or recognition in the public [sphere]
which can help to call attention to
one's situation or to advance one's cause. But equally, the inability to achieve
visibility through the media can confine one to obscurity - and in the worst
cases can lead to
...
...
...
Mediated visibility is not just a vehicle
through which aspects of [contemporary] life are brought to the attention of
others:
it has become a principal means by which
death by neglect
...
political struggles are articulated
and carried out.
(Thompson, 1995: 49, emphasis added)
Those parts of the mass media devoted to 'informing' people, such as
newspapers, typically make frequent and explicit mention of the public.
