Public Connection through Media Consumption: Between Oversocialization and De-Socialization?

Abstract

This article reviews the ongoing contribution of Personal Influence to our understanding of media' social consequences from the perspective of recent research (the London School of Economics “Public Connection” project, 2003-2006, conducted by the authors and Sonia Livingstone) into the extent to which shared habits of media consumption help sustain, or not, U.K. citizens' orientation to a public world. As well as reviewing specific findings of the Public Connection project that intersect with themes of Personal Influence(particularly on citizens' networks of social interaction and the available discursive contexts in which they can put their mediated knowledge of the public world to use), the article reviews the methodological similarities and differences between this recent project and that of Katz and Lazarsfeld. The result, the authors conclude, is to confirm the continued salience of the questions about the social embeddedness of media influences that Katz and Lazarsfeld posed.