Stratified Public Connections - Beyond the Taste for News?

Many scholars have expressed concerns about the well-being of modern societies in the age of digitalisation and datafication, with opaque algorithms on social media supposedly structuring human agency and eroding the foundations of democracy. To address these concerns, I conducted multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) on a rich body of representative survey data on Danish citizens (N = 5660) to examine how citizens connect to and engage within the public sphere, thus providing a sociological contextualisation for understanding the complex interplays between news consumption, broader media usage, cultural lifestyles, and patterns of social inequality. The results showed how tendencies of mistrust and political alienation are not distinctive of social media users; rather, such challenges should be understood through the notion of social stratification. This finding contributes to the discussion on inequality in terms of access to and participation in the public sphere.