Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge
- PDF / 76,844 Bytes
- 4 Pages / 442 x 663 pts Page_size
- 48 Downloads / 180 Views
Book Review Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge Liesbet van Zoonen Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2005. ISBN: 0-7425-2906-1. Acta Politica (2006) 41, 430–433. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500147
Declining turnout to vote in elections, weakening attachments to political parties, and general disaffection with politics in many post-industrial democracies have evoked a good deal of debate about the best way of countering democratic malaise and re-engaging citizens. Scholars and pundits alike have often pointed the finger at popular culture, citing the hours spent watching entertainment rather than news and public affairs programmes. In Entertaining the Citizen, Liesbet van Zoonen makes the heretical claim that we should instead be asking how popular culture might serve to reconnect citizens with politics. She is not the first to make this claim, but no other scholar has provided as sustained an analysis to back it up. Her book examines how popular culture and politics might come together in ways that promote citizenship. Citizenship is equated here with political citizenship, with citizens’ rights and duties in relation to democratic politics. Her central argument is that there are three different senses in which popular culture can entertain citizens. First, popular entertainment can offer a context in which citizens can think about the meaning of citizenship. Second, it can provide a setting that encourages the performance of citizenship. Third, and perhaps most importantly, it can make the performance of those duties enjoyable. Van Zoonen shows how popular culture and politics already mingle. She begins by examining the ubiquitous presence of the soap metaphor in news. Journalists frequently frame news stories as soap operas. As Van Zoonen notes, the use of the soap metaphor is surprising given the dominance of stereotypically masculine metaphors in framing news about politics. The fact that the soap is usually viewed as a quintessentially feminine genre, she suggests, may explain why journalists’ use of the soap metaphor is typically very incomplete. It is almost invariably used in a way that evokes a critical or cynical response and far from drawing the audience into politics, creates distance. Van Zoonen argues that the soap metaphor could be used to engage citizens by involving them emotionally. If politicians’ public and private predicaments were presented in ways that elicited empathy, if there were characters and story lines with which audiences could identify, she maintains, the soap metaphor
Book Review
431
could help audiences to connect politics with their own lives and concerns and get them talking about politics. Her analysis of the relationship between politics and popular music reveals even more of a missed opportunity. She shows that the relationship is decidedly one-sided. While politicians actively seek the endorsement of popular musicians, they rarely look for substantive input from the performers, still less from their fans. The influence of U2’s Bono, she argue
Data Loading...
