Audiences as citizens: Insights from three decades of reception research

This chapter traces the insights about citizenship offered by audience reception research since its inception in the 1980s, through a theoretical and analytical portrait of five historical stages of reception research about mediated citizenship: (1) hegemonic citizenship; (2) monitorial citizenship; (3) popular citizenship; (4) participatory citizenship; and (5) ubiquitous citizenship. Maintaining a strong empirical commitment throughout, mostly to the findings of qualitative research, the chapter also reports substantially from recent and ongoing reception research into the ways in which the news media – and popular and entertainment media in a broader sense – may serve as resources for a political and cultural citizenship that is anchored in everyday life. The five stages of reception research, conceptualized as scientific paradigms, are modeled into a historical typology that synthesizes, for each historical stage, its aims, its theoretical foundation, the preferred methods, the key scholars, and the approximate year in which the paradigm became visible in the scholarly landscape.