Relative Public Disconnection: Poverty and Media Use in the Media Welfare State

Abstract

A growing body of media research indicates systematic links between socioeconomic disadvantage, media use, and disconnection from the world of politics. This article examines media use and public (dis)connection among people who live in relative poverty. Focusing on the comparatively favorable conditions of the Norwegian “media welfare state,” the article first sensitizes the concept of public connection to empirical research on the poverty segment and operationalizes this reconceptualization in the analysis of data from the Norwegian Monitor survey (N = 11,025). The article finds that the low-income demographic generally has a markedly weaker mediated public connection compared with more privileged strata—what we term relative public disconnection. Moreover, we nuance this picture, identifying five main types of public (dis)connection in the low-income segment, each associated with a distinct social profile. On this basis, the article discusses implications for media policy and critiques the key underlying notions of equality and informed citizenship.