School of Journalism & Mass Communication

This article proposes an agenda for research on the
relation of structural inequality to the study of politics
and consumption in the field of communication. The
authors review evidence for increasing inequality in the
United States and argue that (1) consumption choices
and desires are strongly constrained by structural location;
(2) political beliefs and attitudes are shaped by
location in the income or class structure; and (3) consumption
as a form of political self-expression or civic
identity, for example, boycotting or “buycotting,” is also
constrained by economic structural location. Given
these propositions, it becomes critical to analytically
situate notions of personalization of politics within the
context of increasing economic inequality.

Habermas's late theory of the public sphere is fundamentally about democracy and growing complexity. The network form is at the core of growing complexity, and the centrality of networks in the economy, political system, civil society, and the lifeworld calls for revisions in central theoretical assumptions about the structure of the public sphere. We argue that in order to maintain Habermas's larger democratic project, we will have to rethink theoretical assumptions linked to its neo-Parsonsian systems theoretical foundations and to systematically integrate new network forms of social life into theory.