The Civic Value of Being and Audience: The intersection between media and citizenship in audience research

Drawing upon the review of collected literature on publics and participation, this article aims at identifying and analytically mapping those dimensions of being an audience that have been considered as having a civic and political value. On the basis of a deep examination of the vast array of similarities and differences between all the collected contributions, the paper describes a basic morphology of the field identifying three main areas of research: the area of practice, grouping together those contributions that have looked for civic/political value in what people do with media; the area of interpretation, where the emphasis has been put on the symbolic meanings that are produced by people with and through media; the area of space and culture where the political relevance has been found in the mutual interdependence between media practices and meaning making processes. The discussion will show how the three different approaches not only bring different issues into the foreground but also envisage different figures of implied citizens.