This new book by Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre is a highly original analysis of the two key processes that shape the contemporary public sphere. On the one hand, there are the processes of news provision which select out a range of facts and events and bring them to the attention of a large number of people who have not, for the most part, experienced them directly. On the other hand, there are processes of politicization which problematize the facts made known by news provision and treat them as issues that concern citizens and the state. Politicization is typically characterized by a diversity of interpretations which, in turn, gives rise to a proliferation of commentary, discussion, polemic and division.
In order to study these processes and their interaction, Boltanski and Esquerre draw on a vast repository of user comments left on the site of a major daily newspaper, as well as the thousands of comments posted on an online video site. They uncover what is sayable by comparing published comments with those deleted by moderators. They capture opinions in the course of their formation, rather than describing views which have long become cemented; these are often reflexive and wise, deriving from responses to interviews or opinion polls. They map out the parameters of politicization today, touching on various hot topics such as feminism, the environment, immigration, religion, nationalism and Europe.
This is not just a book about the news and the press, but a major new work which shows how political opinion comes into being and the way in which it affects our daily lives. It will be of great value to students and scholars in media studies, sociology and politics, as well as to anyone interested in the state of politics and the media in our contemporary digital age.
By:
Luc Boltanski (Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales Paris),
Arnaud Esquerre
Imprint: Polity Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 231mm,
Width: 158mm,
Spine: 31mm
Weight: 567g
ISBN: 9781509562770
ISBN 10: 150956277X
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 06 December 2024
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
College/higher education
,
Undergraduate
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Acknowledgments Introduction News as a global culture The corpuses of data on which this work has focused The empirical analysis of the politicization and formation of ‘opinions’ Crowds, masses, networks Democracy as it is I Being immersed in the news Chapter 1. The presence and periodization of the inaccessible The consistency of the Now Knowing by experience or by hearsay The accessible and the inaccessible What news in which history? Time’s arrow Some problems of historical periodization The formation of planes of news items The news in the eyes of its critics (1): inauthenticity The news in the eyes of its critics (2): fake democracy Chapter 2. The process of the event News, History and the need to select Selection and censorship The truth of facts, the adequacy of interpretations Trouble with events The coalescence of facts in the plane of news items The de-composition and deconstruction of events Precedents Primary facts and derived facts: the worth and force of an event Political facts as a series Document 1. History (with a capital H) and history Chapter 3. Political events and the formation of generations The salience of events Break or continuity: a question of scale At what scale does Le Monde view the world (le monde)? The obituary test Breaks in institutional continuity The role of major political events in the formation of generations Structural collectives and generational collectives ‘Our generation!’ II Politicization Document 2. Plot Chapter 4. Political discussion Conversation or discussion The risks of political discussion Document 3. Medias Chapter 5. Le Monde and its readers: between news and History Le Monde as a news organ and quasi-institution Le Monde and History Journalists and their readers Document 4. Censured Chapter 6. The structure of comments on the news Pre-texts and comments The constraints on utterance Contesting the truth of the facts: the 11 September 2001 attacks, with comments made on INA Société Discussion, moderation and commercial censorship Commenting is not denouncing The irony of the commentators Document 5. What are their names? Chapter 7. The work of ‘one’ The intense pleasure of comment States of mind Anonymity and mishmash The ‘one’ of the news Document 6. Readers’ replies Chapter 8. Politicizing the news What are they thinking of? What is a political problem? The process of politicization Medically assisted procreation, from the non-political to politics Political shifts Talking about Islam Different shifts in the notion of environmentalism When politics proves to be ‘inextricable’ Document 7. ‘Generations’ Chapter 9. The dynamics of politicization Shifting positions and generation conflicts Political problems and ideologies Threats and remedies Feeding into politicization Document 8. ‘Democracy’ Conclusion. The meaning of History Interpretation: between adequacy and violence ‘On the right’ or ‘on the left’: the political description of interpretations Towards the extreme Politics and desolation The digitalization of struggles Appendices Conceptual lexicon Bibliography Notes Index
Luc Boltanski is Professor of Sociology at EHESS, Paris. Arnaud Esquerre is Director of Research at the CNRS, Paris.
Reviews for The Making of Public Space: News, Events and Opinions in the Twenty-First Century
""The Making of Public Space is about nothing less than how humans produce a shared sense of what they have in common and how they elevate issues to politics. Once again, Boltanski and Esquerre deliver their magic: deeply steeped in pragmatism, their strikingly original book combines convincing theoretical arguments about world-making with richly informed empirical insights. The result is a path-breaking analysis that should inform frontier thinking across the social sciences."" Michèle Lamont, Harvard University
