8/8/2019 Theoretical background to Collective Identity Lesson One

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Collective Identity Theory Lesson One

On the one hand, identity is something unique to each of us that we assume is more orless consistentour identity is something we uniquely possess: it is what distinguishes

us from other people. Yet on the other hand, identity also implies a relationship with abroader collective or social group of some kind. When we talk about national identity,cultural identity, or gender identity, for example, we imply that our identity is partly amatter of what we share with other people. Here, identity is aboutidentification withothers whom we assume are similar to us (if not exactly the same), at least in somesignificant ways.David Buckingham 2008

JurgenHabermas - The Public Sphere...a space...formed and realised between the economy and polity where people could beinformed and discuss, so as to form decisions and act upon them. The instruments ofthis sphere were newspapers, books, salons and debating societies that allowed anarena relatively separate of the Church and the State, characterised by openness to allcitizensIntellectual Scaffolding: On Peter Dahlgrens Theorization of Television and thePublic Sphere - MinnaAslama

Mass culture has earned its rather dubious name precisely by achieving increased salesby adapting to the need for relaxation and entertainment on the part of consumer stratawith relatively little education, rather than through the guidance of an enlarged publictoward the appreciation of a culture undamaged in its substance...The world fashionedby the mass media is a public sphere in appearance only. By the same token the integrityof the private sphere which they promise to their consumers is also an illusion.The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere JurgenHabermas

Habermas position reflects the ambivalence felt by many towards the mass media that there is a great power, but can it be harnessed for the public good? We suggest thatpessimistic answers tend to underestimate the complex and contradictory orfragmented nature of the contemporary mass media which opens the way for someescape from institutional control, while more optimistic positions often set too highideals for the public sphere. Those alternative formulations of the public sphere whichrecognize and build on the complex and fragmentary nature of the media suggest morepositively that the media could facilitate and legitimize the public negotiation throughcom- promise rather than consensus of meanings among oppositional andmarginalized groups. Talk on Television. Audience Participation and the PublicDebate Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt

Television and other media have generated a new type of public realm which has no

spatial limits, which is not necessarily tied to dialogical conversation and which isaccessible to an indefinite number of individuals who may be situated within privatizeddomestic settings. Rather than sounding the death knell of public life, the developmentof mass communication has created a new kind of publicness and hastransformedfundamentally the conditions under which most people are able toexperience what is public and participate today in what could be called a public realm.The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media John B. Thompson