Media poverty: Understanding mediated public connection in everyday conditions of deprivation

Abstract

This article is concerned with how life in poverty affects people’s possibility to enact citizenship through their use of the media. More specifically, it examines the varying preconditions for impoverished citizen’s mediated public connection. Whereas empirical studies into this area are few overall, conceptual approaches have a limited grasp on the many-faceted nature of poverty-induced disconnection and its embeddedness in everyday life. This article first develops the multi-dimensional media poverty framework positing that disconnection can be understood as the outcome of three key preconditioning dimensions: everyday life conditions, access, and resources. Second, applying this framework in the analysis of repeated interviews with 41 poverty-stricken citizens in Norway, it illuminates how possibilities for public connection are preconditioned and restrained by life in poverty. In this way, this article advances conceptual approaches to studying media use in contexts of deprivation and provides new empirical knowledge about a critical demographic seldom studied before.