Written with media students in mind, this accessible book provides both
students and researchers with a new perspective on how to research
engagement, not as a metric but as a marker of power relations.
This book navigates the reader through a tighter analytical notion of
engagement within an understanding of media, culture and democracy.
Dahlgren and Hill offer a new definition of engagement as an energising
internal force, and as such a powerful means to further human agency.
From this definition, the book builds a generative theory of engagement
as a nexus of relations we make and break with media on a daily basis,
with examples from political activism, news and disinformation, and the
global pandemic. Dahlgren and Hill identify five parameters of
engagement in order to understand the relations we have with media
across changing public and mediated spheres. This new perspective offers
students and researchers pathways for investigating the meaning of media
engagement as a resource for living.
It will be particularly useful for undergraduate courses on media
audiences and publics, political communication and democracy, media and
cultural theory, journalism, and for media, communication and sociology
studies more broadly.