Approximately Informed,Occasionally Monitorial? Reconsidering Normative Citizen Ideals

Abstract

This article identifies gaps between normative ideals and realistic accounts of news use in democracy today. Starting from the widespread but unrealistic ideal of the informed citizen, and its more realistic development through notions of the monitorial citizen, we analyze comprehensive qualitative data on news users’ experiences. We describe these news users as approximately informed, occasionally monitorial. This description emphasizes the limited, shifting, and partial figurations of societal information that citizens are able to obtain through their use of journalistic and social media, and thereby challenges normative ideals. How do monitorial ideals function when the citizens are only occasionally on guard? By zooming in on three key gaps between even a less demanding ideal and actual practices in news use, we underline the need to further reconceptualize our expectations of citizens’ news use.

Introduction

Citizens should know about important issues in their societies, and be capable of judging parties and candidates for election based on knowledge of their merits and political positions. This ideal of the informed citizen, born in the age of the printed press, has long been the normative foundation for understanding people as news users. And it still is, decades into the digital age.

The ideal is ingrained in media policy, and in the standards and practices of journalism. The informed citizen is also taken for granted in normative theories of democracy, ranging from liberal, via participatory, through to deliberative theory (e.g., Ferree et al. 2002). In the field of political communication, advanced and nuanced studies of relations between news use and political participation of different kinds base their measurement on a general idea of an informed citizen (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996). This is implicit when comparing trends in news consumption (e.g., Aalberg et al. 2013) or “political information environments” cross-nationally (Esser et al. 2012), or when correlating news use with civic participation (e.g., Ksiazek et al. 2010). The ideal is explicit when researchers survey citizens’ insights into current affairs and link knowledge standards to uses of various media (Curran et al. 2014; Jensen and Helles 2015). Such studies provide detailed discussions of how different media, ownership, or funding models matter. They offer less differentiation concerning what kind of news use, and how much, is meritorious and not for citizens (cf. Kligler-Vilenchik 2017).

Having established that the ideal of the informed citizen is widespread, it is crucial to note that it is also outrageously unrealistic. No one can keep up-to-date with everything that goes on across the political domain. Selecting the most important issues is a process that comes with its own set of challenges and is in itself a topic of public contestation, as noted in critiques of public inclusions and exclusions (e.g., Benhabib 1992). More fundamentally, it is not clear that an informed citizen would match with a good citizen: being informed is not necessarily enough to be capable of participating in democracy, and being informed is not necessarily always required to participate. Inspired by “democratic realism” (Nielsen 2017; Williams 2005) and the regulative potential of nonideal theory, we want to address the core challenge of what a normative—but perhaps less ambitious—conceptualization of citizens’ news use would look like.

Almost twenty years ago, Michael Schudson argued that the ideal of the informed citizen badly needed to be reconsidered. He convincingly showed how different versions of democracy should be followed by different citizen concepts. For Schudson (2000: 16), the 1900s brought forward the monitorial citizen, a citizen “informed enough and alert enough.” Based on the discussion opened by Schudson, this article focuses on gaps between norms and practice in news use today. The aim is to better understand what constitutes such gaps, and when they become overwhelming for citizens, and thus problematic. Our purpose is neither to mourn a decline in the capability of citizens nor to assess the state of journalism and news provision in itself, but to make us aware of exactly where the nonideal real world differs from our expectations. With such insights, we are better equipped to constructively improve democracy.

We will first discuss the citizen ideals that we interrogate, arguing, through review of previous work, that understandings of the processes of monitoring and getting informed remain underdeveloped. Next, we describe our methodological approach. We have conducted a new large-scale qualitative study of media use in Norway, a country that might be considered a critical case as a Nordic welfare state with a still comparatively strong standing for journalistic news production. Our data encompasses fifty informants participating in two rounds of in-depth interviews intercepted by a media diary phase. The analysis then commences in two steps. First, we relate the experiences of our informants to the ideals of being informed and monitorial. We show, as a main tendency, how people adhere to the ideals and take measures to uphold them but yet fail to live up to them in practice in various ways. In the second step, we further unpack variations within and beyond this main tendency, as we identify three potentially problematic gaps: declining “worthwhileness” in following the news, high threshold for engaging, and failure to find information. Through this discussion, we develop a foundation for more realistic conceptualizations of news use in contemporary democracies.

Conceptualizations of the Citizen: Informed and Monitorial

The ideals we operate with when assessing how democratic societies work have not materialized out of thin air. They have historical roots. Such is also the case for the specific ideas of how citizens should act when participating in the rule of society.

In Schudson’s work on U.S. political history, a key moment is the reform movement in the late nineteenth century, with the printed press as the main channel for news, helped by the telegraph and the recent invention of the telephone. Radio broadcasting was decades away. This period brought a shift in expectations directed to citizens. They were no longer supposed to confirm their trust in a respected candidate or pledge alliance to a group, as previous voting practices had entailed. The period gave birth to a new ideal of citizens’ relations to the media and vice versa: an informed citizen capable of considering the candidates for election based on their individual merits (Schudson 1998), coupled with a full news standard for journalism, “an aspiration to sober, detailed, and comprehensive coverage of public affairs” (Zaller 2003: 114).

The initial problem with this concept is the burden it puts on the citizen. In our complex societies, no one can be expected to keep abreast with issues that pertain to all aspects of the political domain. This is exactly the argument of liberal thinker Benjamin Constant, as put forward in his 1819 speech on the relationship between republican and liberal (Constant [1819] 2011). Liberty to the ancients, according to Constant, was collective exercise of political sovereignty, but to the moderns, it meant individual rights guaranteeing basic freedoms of speech, religion, movement, and association (Gripsrud et al. 2011: xxxviii). Constant argued that the republican ideal was far too burdensome for citizens. They could not get involved as a collective in the running of society (Constant [1819] 2011).

This basic point is key to a range of scholars who have taken a pessimistic, or realistic, stance on the question of popular participation in democracy, from Lippmann’s (1925) skepticism toward citizens’ abilities to reach qualified understandings of public affairs, via Schumpeter ([1942] 2010), through to Downs’s (1957) rational-choice model seeking to explain why it is reasonable for a voter to outsource political information gathering. Political scientists as well as economists have recently taken up some of these ideas, perhaps most prominently in the strand of work that study “rational ignorance” (i.e., when and why it makes sense for a citizen to not seek out information) or other forms of ignorance. Popular books excoriate voters’ lack of abilities to form opinions based on knowledge and act responsibly (e.g., Caplan 2007), sometimes to the extent that the right to vote is questioned (Brennan 2016).

The key question is how citizens get informed. We rely on “information shortcuts” and “act on the basis of other people’s beliefs and statements” in a range of everyday situations, as well as in political life (Christiano 2017). Without such shortcuts, the burden of participating in political life would be impossible to bear. The concept of the monitorial citizen attempts to ease that burden.

A monitorial citizen is not a substitute for the informed one. Citizen concepts are not exclusive, as illustrated by the work of Achen and Bartels (2016), who show how many, even well-informed, citizens today base their decisions on social loyalties, much like Schudson argued in his historical work. Rather, the monitorial citizen is a type added to the existing concepts of citizenship, but one better suited to capture essentials of citizens’ activities in modern societies. The informed citizen gathers information. The monitorial citizen supervises or surveils, and can multitask while being watchful (Schudson 1998).

If this frees the citizen of the burden of routine information gathering, it still leaves a key issue unresolved. The concept black-boxes the process of surveillance, or the ways in which the citizen gets “informed enough.” This is also evident in later discussions of monitorial citizens, which tend to focus on political interest, efficacy, action, and channels for participation (Hooghe and Dejaeghere 2007) or transformations in active engagement (e.g., Hustinx et al. 2012; Kligler-Vilenchik 2017; also Keane 2009 on “monitory democracy,” which Schudson 2015 builds on), but not on the actual monitoring. Schudson is careful to underline that the media are neither that central to democracy nor to citizens’ information gathering and environmental surveillance (Schudson 1998). Still, the process of being alerted, what role media and other channels or arenas play, remains to be unpacked.

Scholars have discussed whether the monitorial citizen could trigger a corresponding norm for journalism. Before the break through of online news, Zaller argued that journalism should reach those less informed, those with little devotion to public life. He proposed a “burglar alarm standard” that would “call attention to matters requiring urgent attention, and . . . do so in excited and noisy tones” (Zaller 2003: 122). As alarms tend to be, news would be hard to miss and expected to sound at irregular intervals to alert the monitorial citizen. Bennett (2003) forcefully rejected the idea, claiming it merely described an all too familiar sensational news business and thus lacked normative potential.

The actual ringing of alarm bells might seem to be easier in a digital media landscape, where tailored apps, push alerts, and topic-specific live blogging abound. Meijer and Kormelink (2015) studied news use in 2004 and 2014, and identified monitoring as one of several practices, and to be easier and more widespread in 2014. In their understanding, though, monitoring concerns giving full attention to something unfolding here and now, like following a live blog during a natural disaster. As such, the term in their usage seems ill-fitted as an overall strategy for citizens. Other practices identified in the same study appear necessary to add to the monitorial palette, including checking, which concerns “finding out . . . whether something ‘new’ and ‘interesting’ has happened” (Meijer and Kormelink 2015: 669), or scanning, which they describe as “efficiently seeing whether there are any new developments within a specific domain” (Meijer and Kormelink 2015: 671).

In a critique of political communication scholars’ use of “civic-IQ tests,” Graber (2006) argues that we need to ask how monitorial citizens “get enough information to feel that they can make a reasonably good choice to cope with the situation in question, even if it is not necessarily the ideal choice” (Graber 2006: 172). She proposes a four-step process of opinion formation: “understand the main impact of the problem on your life, know your values and priorities, know the thrust of major options, and discuss the situation with others” (Graber 2006: 174). Steps 1 and 3 require input that would often come from media, particularly journalism—something external that makes the citizen aware and yields understanding. The question remains how these practices of monitoring are carried out, how they depart from our reasonable expectations, and when those departures become problematic. These are the questions we scrutinize in our analysis.

Our interest is akin to what is referred to as democratic realism, which has a lineage to realist work quoted above but recently often linked to philosophers such as Williams (2005) and Geuss (2008). Media research continues to give much attention to theories of justice and democracy, which formulates ideals such as the informed citizen—deliberative theory’s public sphere concept being a prime case (e.g., Lunt and Livingstone 2013). Recently, however, some scholars have argued for a different approach. They argue that we need to balance a critical stance with “realisability” and the engagement with empirical research (Nielsen 2017; Rasmussen 2016), and thus retain a normative potential. With such an interest, one can attempt to move away from a top-down, linear way of thinking about the informing of the citizenry (Coleman and Moss 2015).

In a recent article, Nielsen (2017) shows how democratic realism can facilitate a focused discussion of the most important normative expectations we can have of the media, or, in his case, of journalism. Nielsen (2017: 1257) calls Schudson’s position (which he labels liberal optimism) too broad and normatively “far too ambitious.” We agree that for an ideal to serve its function, it needs to offer a systematic understanding of how to reform our nonideal world. This search for a “useful regulative ideal” (Nielsen 2017: 1252) is, for us, the core challenge.

While we should be careful not to conflate the nonideal/ideal theory debate with realist thought in general (Sleat 2016), we take inspiration from both: As in nonideal theory, we are interested in the gaps “between what we ought to aim for and what we can do” (Frazer 2010: 498). And like Williams (2005: 49), we want to explore the balance between “thin” concepts, which offer abstract and procedural considerations removed from people’s everyday lives, and “thick” concepts, which are substantive and more easily related to a specific “ethical constituency.” We are interested in how to more fruitfully describe normative expectations of the citizen’s relations to mediated news. The discussion of discrepancies between the concept of the monitorial citizen and empirical findings is our way to pursue that interest.

Methods, Data, and Analytical Approach

Our analysis is based on comprehensive qualitative data collected in Norway in the fall of 2016, as part of the project “Media Use, Culture and Public Connection: Freedom of Information in the «Age of Big Data».” Inspired by Couldry et al.’s (2007) study of media use and attention to democratic matters among U.K. citizens, our study combined two rounds of in-depth interviews with media diaries.

We aimed at a large sample—fifty informants—who would mirror the Norwegian population according to significant demographic criteria. Recruiting through networks and snowballing, we paid close attention to gender, age, minority representation, and rural and urban areas. Using examples from a detailed sociological analysis of the constitution of social classes in Norway (Hansen et al. 2009), we ensured diversity in educational levels and professions.

Our data collection followed three phases. First, a long in-depth interview focused on informants’ backgrounds, interests, daily lives, and uses of media and culture, including a segment on citizenship ideals and democratic participation. Following these interviews, in the month of October 2016, the informants participated in media diaries with daily and weekly entries. The diaries had a semiopen format, combining two central understandings of diaries (Lindlof and Taylor 2002: 118) as tracking patterns of shared experiences and allowing individual reflection. Informants were given a few prompts, for example, news stories one had noticed and issues one had engaged with, but were otherwise invited to write freely. The second round of interviews was conducted immediately after the diary phase. These interviews followed up not only on the individual diary and declared interests of each informant but also on news stories that had emerged as central to many participants. Our aim was to investigate engagement with particular issues, or lack thereof, in greater depth.

In what follows, we primarily focus on segments of the two rounds of interviews, while the diary constitutes a methodological tool to get from the overarching explorations of the first interviews to the issue-focused and more detailed investigations of the second. The interviews have been analyzed thematically, shifting between strategies of meaning condensing and deeper interpretation, as suggested by Kvale (Brinkmann and Kvale 2015) and Schrøder et al. (2003: 166). As presented below, the first step of our analysis focuses on themes that appear dominant in the data overall, while the second step delves deeper into particular aspects not necessarily shared by the informant group in general. Quotes and interpretations from the two interview rounds are mixed in both parts of the analysis, but we identify which round quotes originate from, to openly indicate how participation in the research process could encourage informants to reflect further on their news use.

Our case country Norway is a small, oil-rich nation state. We assume that conditions there will have “strategic importance in relation to the general problem,” meaning the country is a “critical case” to study (Flyvbjerg 2006: 229). Comparative political science describes Norway as a Nordic welfare state, with widespread political participation, high levels of trust in institutions, and high electoral turnout (e.g., Esping-Andersen 1990; Hilson 2008). Norway’s media system is characterized by proactive state interventions operating at an arm’s-length distance, a popular publicly funded broadcaster, a fine-masked structure of local and national newspapers with a very egalitarian readership, and a high penetration of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in general (Hallin and Mancini 2004; Syvertsen et al. 2014).

The latter point is relevant for a particular aspect of our analysis. We will contextualize our findings in light of two crucial components of contemporary media use: smart phones and social media. While traditional media institutions still play lead roles in the production of journalism in Norway, smart phones and social media represent key access points to the informants’ “political information environments” (cf. Esser et al. 2012). Although it is used in different ways, almost all our informants talk about the smart phone as central to their media use. The smart phone is in itself a cross-media device (Thorhauge 2016) and so thoroughly integrated in the everyday lives of our informants that it makes less sense to single it out in separate parts of the analysis, or compare it with other news habits. Social media is also part of contemporary news use and a meta-environment for cross-media use (Mathieu and Pavlickova 2017), and we will delve further into their relations to legacy media and journalistic content through our analysis. Our design, then, is inspired by cross-media approaches (Hovden and Moe 2017; Lomborg and Mortensen 2017; Schrøder 2011). We analyze news consumption from the perspective of the user, as part of broader repertoires (Hasebrink and Domeyer 2012) integrated in everyday life practices, spanning a variety of media platforms. Following our ambition to contribute to more realistic understandings, the cross-media approach highlights not a predefined notion of which news to study the uses of, but rather the relative importance and worthwhileness of news (Schrøder 2015), as experienced by different users.

Approximately Informed, Occasionally Monitorial

In the first step of our analysis, we relate the experiences of our informants to the overarching ideals of being informed and monitorial. The aim is to identify how the ideals are operative in descriptions of everyday routines, and to establish how informants discuss and asses their own practices.

Approximately Informed

Previous studies have found that people tend to show support for citizen norms, also those related to duties, but that such support is only weakly related to actual practice (e.g., Dalton 2009; Hagen 1994 on new participatory forms of citizenship). We find similar tendencies, which are worth exploring in detail both with regard to differences between informants and some striking overarching tendencies.

In the first round of interviews, nearly everyone stated that it was important to follow the news. There were exceptions we will return to later, but most shared the basic sentiment. When we asked why, responses (from those who had answered affirmatively) could be identified as falling into three main categories: eloquent expressions of citizen responsibilities, vaguer hints at some implied societal significance, and baffled or humorous reactions that the question was difficult to answer. Furthermore, lived practices differed considerably, a feeling that many expressed in the first interview and reiterated more forcefully in the second:

I feel as though I’m a person who is informed and who reflects on what’s going on. But as I was writing it down [for the media diary] . . . I couldn’t remember . . . and suddenly . . . I wondered if it’s because, when I read or watch the news . . . I don’t have much time for that, so I’m skimming on the surface a lot. I take in all these impressions, but I don’t notice singular news stories or details . . . so I guess I’m superficially informed, then. (Sissel, 36, advisor/cultural sector, second interview)

The quote above was given in response to a question about the experience of doing a media diary, and shows an informant concluding that she is, contrary to her own preconceptions, only “superficially informed.” While she touches on recurring themes such as memory and time pressure, the most interesting part of her reflection concerns a vague feeling of scanning the news, receiving a multitude of impressions, but yet not being informed as an outcome. This informant chooses the term superficial to align practice and ideals, but we would argue “approximate” is more accurate because superficiality is often—but not always or only—the problem. We find that practices that can be deemed superficial—such as scanning the news or catching the headlines—are combined with occasionally selecting topics to give fuller attention, hoping to arrive at a deeper understanding. This also sometimes fails, as we will return to. Furthermore, the result of superficial news use can be approximate information, as this informant describes:

I try to capture the essence of what goes on. Even though the media are very . . . they’re skewed towards events of the day, so you have to search actively for yourself because things slip away . . . one day it’s Iraq and the next it’s Syria . . . [The media coverage] isn’t all that comprehensive . . . and we forget also, from one day to the next . . . So I should be better at different forms of updates, going deeper into things . . . but I’ve got a busy life. There isn’t time for everything. (Erik, 39, taxi driver, first interview)

He tries to “capture the essence”—details and contexts are beyond his level of ambition, as is fully understandable. Lack of continued attention, both in the shifting spotlight of the news media, and in his busy life, is to blame. Similar tendencies are found in the overall material. People find it important to keep up with the news, take different measures to feel informed, and, with various strength, reproach themselves for lack of in-depth understanding of what goes on in the world.

It is important to point out that endorsement of high standards and self-critical judgments could be results of two research effects. The first is that participation in a project with interviews and media diaries could trigger greater awareness of media habits, as some of our informants expressed to us when interviewed the second time. The second is that informants could align their reflections with what they expect the researcher would want to hear. However, we underline that the aim of our analysis is not to judge the veracity of informants’ accounts, or even their news use against predefined standards, but rather to point to gaps resulting from discrepancies between expectation and practices of news use. We find approximately informed to describe one feature of these gaps.

Occasionally Monitorial

A widespread response to the experienced impossibility of being informed is, for our informants, to develop different measures to strategically oversee the news, and devote time and attention when something feels important. These practices are closely related to conceptualizations of the monitorial citizen as news user. They evoke a person with interest in politics, capable of acting on that interest when need be—here through the devotion of time and attention. But what do people monitor, how do they do it, and what is their threshold for reacting? While the concept of the monitorial citizen works well for describing contemporary news use on an overall level, gaps arise in response to these particular questions.

Our findings show the smart phone as the key platform for, and an emblematic symbol of, news consumption that at first glance appears monitorial. There are two striking tendencies in how our informants talk about smart phone use.

First, they describe quick and short bursts of use in spare moments throughout the day, “checking Facebook,” “checking stuff,” or “getting up to date.”

Suddenly I might wonder what I’m doing. It’s one thing to check groups and messages and those red circles [alerts] . . . and then you start, you check it, and then scroll down a little, and suddenly a lot of time has passed. For a long time I didn’t have a smart phone, I only got one a few years ago . . . and life was fine without it. (Torgrim, 43, farmer, second interview)

This news habit is at the outset in line with what Meijer and Kormelink (2015) labeled “checking,” a practice linked to routine cycles, for instance, through visiting the same websites or the same apps each time a spare moment arrives. Meijer and Kormelink do not highlight how informants feel about such practices. We find that many of our informants seem to struggle with describing the content of such news habits, or even any effect. Not only is it hard to remember news consumed recently, but it is also difficult to explain any outcome from such smart phone use. A concern for the lack of educational effect of media is not new; especially television got reproached for failing to communicate news in a way that lead users to remember and learn (e.g., Gunter 1987). We are not claiming any technologically deterministic result of smart phone use. The crux of the matter in our data is not a failure among informants to summarize knowledge obtained through news accessed on smart phones but rather that issues they came across in checking seem to go unnoticed. Following Couldry et al. (2007: 3) that democratic engagement is premised on some form of attention, at least some of the time, this form of smart phone use resembles monitorial practices but without the crucial basic level of attention being in place.

This relates to the second tendency in how our informants talk about smart phone use. In contrast to earlier studies’ portrayal of the media user as welcoming the newfound control over news flows facilitated by online services and smart phones (e.g., Meijer and Kormelink 2015), many of our informants express ambivalence toward the phone and are often critical of their own and other people’s dependency on it.

The phone is of course used more than I want . . . I try more and more to not to bring it with me, because I have a tendency like many others to be a little bit online all the time, and I don’t want that. (Aina, 30, hairdresser, first interview)

News use is integrated in the interstices of our informants’ daily routines (Dimmick et al. 2010). Still, the seemingly limited and varied benefits of such use, combined with feelings of resistance and dissociation with the habit itself, points to a gap also in the practice of monitoring. To get a better understanding of this gap, we need to consider the role of social media.

Social media, often used through the smart phone, are important channels for news, but in very different ways for different informants. Facebook stands out as the most used and most interesting example. Some, particularly with higher education or creative professions, use social media strategically to monitor the news:

Facebook is where I start, because there is a greater chance of finding something worth reading in my feed than by randomly surfing through five Norwegian online newspapers. (Sigurd, 66, professional writer, first interview)

This form of use depends on curating the Facebook feed and other social media streams to deliver interesting content that serves personal monitorial purposes. Another informant, who runs his own technology company, talks of tailoring his Twitter feed so that it is not only superior to the general news media but also a near replacement for specialized international magazines and research in his sector. Awareness of technical affordances, and of whom to follow, is, therefore, important. This resonates with findings from studies of how the smart phone functions as a coordinating tool, to micro-manage everyday lives, for which careful maintenance of app settings and system configurations are key (Thorhauge 2016).

But Facebook is also a valuable news channel for less knowledgeable “curators.” Many of our informants express that news sharing is essentially good but that one needs to be cautious. Assessing the credibility of senders and sharers is another demanding task for the contemporary news user. Then, there are also those who are “incidentally exposed” (Fletcher and Nielsen 2017) to news on social media. For a few of our informants, Facebook is a main source of news even though they do not know who the sender or sharer is, or how the news stories happen to appear in their streams.

I actually do get a bit updated via Facebook. Believe it or not! When I don’t care much, it comes . . . it pops up! So if I hadn’t had Facebook, I wouldn’t have known much. (Unni, 50, on disability benefits, only interview)

This is Facebook supporting what Cass Sunstein (2007) calls “an architecture of serendipity.” Such engagement of “inadvertent audiences” (Esser et al. 2012) is a key function for general interest intermediaries in a fragmented media system, according to warnings against the downside of personalized media. Serendipitous effects are sometimes explicitly discussed by our informants as one advantage of edited journalistic media such as print newspapers or broadcast television. These media will give you things you did not know to search for, with the comforting feeling that someone else is taking responsibility for watching the bigger picture:

With the Internet you have to decide consciously to access things. I have to think to myself “now I’m going to watch the news,” but with the [public service broadcaster] NRK television channel on in the background, then interesting programs will just come on the air . . . not always, but often. The other day I watched a program with Michael Moore about the American election. I would never have watched that on the Internet, because I didn’t know it existed. (Tina, 34, teacher, second interview)

This informant was pondering whether she should cancel her subscription to a bundle of television channels, balancing time used, money spent, and information and entertainment gained. After wondering if Netflix was “enough,” she rather concluded that she needed to maintain traditional viewing practices of channels such as the public service broadcaster, to catch information useful for understanding events of the world. Many of our informants had made opposite decisions in similar dilemmas and rather canceled subscriptions to legacy media to rely on monitorial practices online.

In making these considerations, the informants are fundamentally discussing what to monitor, and how to do it. Some express uncomfortable feelings of not being able to be on guard, as they would like to. Others accept the need for choosing monitorial practices even if they miss out. One informant, who is an immigrant to Norway, compared his attitude toward following the news to his feelings for his native country: He likes it when he is there, but he is the sort of person who is happy wherever he is, and does not feel sorry for what he might be missing out on elsewhere. His generally high levels of news use focused on issues that interest him could, therefore, be broken by periods of nonuse without the self-reproaching feelings others expressed to us.

Another informant, quoted in the previous section saying he did not have time to develop detailed understandings of the news, reflected on the experience of doing a diary in a way that finely illustrates monitorial dilemmas:

I was surprised at how monotonous I am. It was the same week after week, sports I follow and the same websites I check . . . There are no big changes unless there’s some really big news story, like the U.S. presidential election or terror. It was interesting to note that I only rarely jump out of my little bubble. I think that I should’ve expanded my horizon, or is it just natural to keep track of one’s own interests, to focus on that? I don’t know . . . I’ve been thinking about it, but not finding a solution. (Erik, 39, taxi driver, second interview)

With the vast amounts of available information, and the complexities of evaluating trustworthiness and contextualizing events, people are neither fully informed nor able to constantly control what they might be missing. Occasionally monitorial is a fitting description of this latter aspect of news practices.

This description challenges our normative ideals by asking how citizens make decisions with the shifting and partial figurations of societal information they are able to obtain. The result is a gap between theory and practice. In itself, a gap is not only expected but also needed. Without a gap, there would be no normative potential in our expectations. The question that remains is when these gaps become unsurmountable. How do monitorial ideals function when the citizens are only occasionally on guard, with merely a rough idea of what goes on? A notion of remote, but yet constant vigilance, seems to be embedded in the concept, as expressed in Schudson’s metaphor of parents watching their children play in a swimming pool, ready to intervene if necessary (Schudson 1998: 311). If the citizen only sometimes monitors based on approximate information, the metaphor breaks down.

Three Potentially Problematic Aspects of the Gaps

After discussing our key finding that people’s news use practices are, in reference to the ideals, approximately informed and occasionally monitorial, we now examine closely three elements that constitute potentially problematic aspects of these gaps. The three elements concern declining “worthwhileness” of following the news, high threshold for engaging, and failure to find information. The aim of this second step of our analysis is to get a better understanding of how and when, exactly, news practices venture so far from normative expectation that the norms become less helpful as a resource for understanding citizens’ engagement with public life. While the first part of our analysis focused on major tendencies within the material, such as shared monitorial dilemmas finding different expressions, we now delve deeper into nuances and variations between informants, and tensions within and between their accounts.

Declining “Worthwhileness” of Following the News

The first element of a potentially problematic gap is decline in news use and the experienced “worthwhileness” of following the news. As argued by Schrøder (2015), audiences’ subjective experiences of news being “worthwhile” follow several interlinked and not necessarily explicit dimensions, bridging concerns such as time and money spent with normative pressures and judgments of news content (Schrøder 2015: 63). Most informants appeared to find continued worthwhileness in trying to follow the news, but for some, the worthwhileness had declined to a point where news use became scarcer, ever more superficial, or neared total decline.

We have established that most of our informants adhered to the ideal of the informed citizen as, precisely, an ideal, but there were exceptions. When asked whether they found it important to follow the news, a few would say no. In these informants’ reasoning, there were several elements of media criticism. This could concern failure on the part of journalism to cover important issues, or experiences of occasionally having inside information on a topic and feeling dismayed at tabloid news coverage. As our interviews allowed for delving deeper into such accounts, we found stories of declining news use over a period of years, with technological developments as critical junctures for making the choice to stop following the news.

The informant Geir, an engineer in his forties, exemplifies the problem. He used to subscribe to the regional broadsheet paper. In the transformation to digital, he felt the print paper got slimmer and dominated by generic news agency stories. Simultaneously, Geir found that surfing headlines on the regional paper’s website was enough to keep up to date. In addition, his wife follows a local news provider’s Facebook page and forwards stories she thinks he will be interested in. So, his news consumption has gone from paying for and reading a quality broadsheet print paper to skimming headlines online, staying clear of the paywall, and getting local news filtered through his wife.

For some informants, then, changes in news habits (more checking or scanning) following changes in technological affordances (especially with the smart phone) and changes in the business of journalism (especially paywalls) can together lead to a problematically low level of attention toward the public. This makes decline in news use and perceived worthwhileness of following the news the first problematic gap we wish to emphasize. The interlinked and not necessarily explicit criteria for judging the worthwhileness of news could, in themselves, hint at the difficulties involved in countering this problem.

High Threshold for Engaging

The second element we emphasize concerns a crucial aspect of the monitorial citizen: At what point must the citizen intervene? In Schudson’s development of the term, the citizen springs into action when issues require her to do so, and the purpose of monitorial practices is to catch when this might be. However, transferred to the question of what information citizens would need, this question of threshold also concerns how little one might know and still be capable of participating. What sort of event would it be absolutely crucial to be informed about, or, in Zaller’s term, when should the burglar alarm ring?

Many of our informants expressed the importance of knowing whether something serious or drastic had happened. They further expressed confidence that they would, even with approximate and occasional news use, be able to learn of a dramatic event. This confidence was related to ideas of a critical line that cannot be crossed in terms of how little you could follow the news—according to some, often unspecified, standard.

[I check the public service broadcaster’s website] because I assume that if the alarm rings at Reuters, then it will be featured there. Just so I know there’s no war started, you know . . . Then I’m happy, then I can get going with what I should be doing. (Jonas, 36, artist, first interview)

If I catch the three biggest headlines I’m happy. So I can conclude that World War III hasn’t broken out yet . . . so that’s fine . . . I think. (Geir, 42, engineer, first interview)

These two informants invoking such similar examples have very different news habits. Jonas follows the news extensively, but irregularly, at times disconnecting and at times immersing himself in issues important to him. His fairly advanced monitorial practices operate on two levels: In social media, he finds interesting pieces shared by people and groups he follows strategically. Meanwhile, checking a public service broadcaster, trusted to report headlines from an international news agency, is his means of hearing if the alarm goes off. Geir, whose declining news habits were described above, is also one of the few who say “no” when asked if it is important to follow the news.

Both of them, and other informants, refer to the outbreak of war as the minimum you have to know to be okay. The standard they are working from seems to concern what you need to know for you and your family to be safe, and for ordinary life to continue as normal, rather than to contribute to the rule of society through public participation. In a similar but less dramatic vein, some informants refer to local events—exemplified by a car crash causing traffic jams—as what you need to know in your daily life. Others, entering this territory by considering how news use relates to their work, express how dramatic something would have to be to affect them:

If I were to take a three-month break from the media now, I would say I could function in approximately the same way with regard to my job and my family. Unless something drastic had happened with the economy that affects ordinary people. (Vidar, 59, bank manager, second interview)

This informant follows the news steadily, engages in discussions with friends and family, and takes a keen interest in economic issues he considers important to society and relevant to his job. Yet, except from the imagined and, as he considers it, unlikely event of a drastic upheaval in the economy, he would be doing fine without the news.

These examples show, first, a dependence on dramatic and shocking events to break the threshold of the monitorial citizen. This gives priority to certain scenarios over others that could be deemed equally important: outbreak of violent conflict, but not institutionalized oppression, a natural disaster, but not the gradually growing threat of climate change. Second, in between the information one might catch due to personal interest, and the dramatic events that ring the alarm, there is a layer of information missing. This concerns most of the day-to-day workings of democratic politics in nation states and local communities. News on education, health, welfare, or the economy, and the ordinary political debates outside elections or scandals, would typically be ignored. To highlight this gap is not primarily to criticize the news users who miss out on information but rather to illuminate a problematic notion embedded in monitorial practices—they prioritize certain kinds of information and not necessarily the information citizens might need most.

Failure to Find Information

While the first two problematic gaps concern routine consumption of news, the third refers to a different kind of use: searching for, finding, and digging into information on self-declared interests. When a citizen is alerted to an issue that demands attention, getting more information seems a requirement before forming an opinion to potentially act on. We have established that monitorial practices could prioritize the dramatic. However, in addition to monitoring to ensure that war has not broken out, people also monitor by following topics they feel strongly about. This is a widespread practice both for eager and occasional news users among our informants. It appeared as a relevant and understandable solution to not being able to follow everything. However, the problematic side of this strategy appears for those who do not find or engage with relevant information even on their self-declared interests.

One informant who exemplifies this tendency is Knut, a bartender in his twenties. He voices many of the criticisms of the media already mentioned: Journalism is not worth paying for, the media fails to cover important issues, and coverage is distorted and sensational. Voting is important, but following the news is not, nor is it a priority in his daily life. However, Knut also articulates strong political opinions and high levels of engagement on a number of issues that he feels the media should pay attention to. Some of his examples, related to his passion for music, concern topics in the local cultural sector that the broadsheet newspaper in his city does indeed cover—although often behind the paywall he finds annoying and not worth the money.

Another example of a topic where informants seemingly fail to find news coverage concerns bullying, peer-pressure, and social problems affecting young people. Several informants who are parents of teenagers mention this as crucially important to society, and worthy of more extensive media coverage. Yet the same informants often describe substantial challenges with finding time or energy for engaging with news, as they navigate work and family obligations with busy schedules and conflicting demands. Consequently, their eagerness to draw attention to an important issue is not necessarily followed by finding the information that is available. This does not necessarily hinder engagement through parenting roles, or very locally in school communities, but it does appear as an obstacle to connecting these public engagements—important in their own right—to ongoing processes that could entail possibilities for action in the political system.

We see how monitoring practices become a problem when some informants complain to us about the lack of coverage of public issues they find important—issues that in fact are covered extensively in the mainstream media. The failure to find this coverage is linked not only to time spent looking and to the impossibility of examining every relevant outlet but also to social resources. If judgments on different criteria for worthwhileness result in declining news use, as argued above, the problematic result of these practices can appear in failure to find information even on self-declared interests.

Conclusion

The starting point for this article was the observation that our understanding of the relations between citizens as news users and democratic participation is in need of nuanced and critical scrutiny. We based our discussion on the work stemming from, and related to, Schudson’s concept of a monitorial citizen, which we see as an inroad to analyze what a good enough citizen as a news user would look like today. For that purpose, we focused on unpacking aspects of monitoring, connecting it with the outcome of becoming informed enough.

In our analysis of qualitative data from fifty informants in Norway, we have presented a two-step argument concentrating on contemporary news practices where smart phones and social media are ingrained with journalistic news content across media platforms. First, we have showed how people endorse citizen duties including norms of being informed, but at the same time describe failure to live up to them in their everyday lives. In discussing gaps between theory and practice, we argued that our informants seem informed on an approximate level and monitorial merely occasionally. This, we hold, is not a reason for knee-jerk condemning people’s failure to live up to an ideal. Rather, being able to identify gaps is a key reason for operating with expectations in the first place. Therefore, in the second step of the analysis, we identified three elements of these gaps, which, for some informants, represent problems. Our motive for focusing on these rarer, but more problematic instances, is that they represent potential breaking points in the usefulness of unrealized ideals.

In order for an ideal to serve its function, it must be possible to identify meaningful routes for reaching closer to it. We have attempted to relate actually existing norms with a good enough ideal—to bolster the “thin” abstract concepts of citizen ideals with “thick” concepts that are meaningful to, and guide, people in their everyday lives and personal ethical experiences (Williams 2005: 48). While democratic ideals should be recognizable to citizens, this does not imply that citizens are alone with the burden of figuring out how to align practice and norms that are stretched far apart. Rather, identifying problematic gaps points to the need for further research, and eventually to the need for structural or political change.

While our analysis contributes to a nuanced understanding of exactly when practices of news use might hinder citizens’ engagement with political issues, it does have some limitations. It is worth stressing that we have based our discussion on qualitative data from one societal context. Similar studies conducted elsewhere could yield different results, and thereby different normative implications. This is, we would argue, less of a problem than a necessary implication as we operationalize—or “thicken”—a shared, overarching ideal in different social contexts.

A second limitation is our media-centered approach. A comprehensive picture would add nonmediated channels to the public. Many of our informants have strong networks outside the media—through their families, civil society, or work. For them, the kind of news use we have described here might not be a problem. Others do not have such a network and depend on the media to be alerted to burning issues. For them, the kind of news use described here could be problematic. With varying degrees of social cohesion in different societies, and in different groups within the same society, this broader picture should be considered to determine the relative weight of the problems we have pointed to.

Based on our discussion, we have found one particularly important caveat with the concept of the monitorial citizen: the focus it gives to dramatic events. As we have shown, this too resembles the actual practices of some of our informants. Still, it leaves something wanting when it comes to a comprehensive ideal fit to cover the everyday political life in a society, the slowly building issues that can have grave effects in the long run. Nevertheless, we would claim the monitorial citizen remains a relevant concept to work with—to qualify and develop—when discussing the necessary normative requirements for citizens today. As a concept, it facilitates nuanced discussion of where, exactly, things go wrong—for the media and for citizens.

We all rely on information shortcuts to navigate through life (e.g., Christiano 2017). When attending to our role as citizens, those shortcuts are not only news media but also people around us. Analyses such as the one presented here serve as a starting point for improving the shortcuts further, to try to furnish our societies in a way that helps us navigate, monitor, and be informed enough.