Mediated Political Playground: Popular Entertainment Culture and Public Sphere Engagement among Young Adults in a Context of Political Contentiousness

This dissertation explores the relationship between young people, their popular entertainment media, and playful engagement with politics in the civil/public sphere(s) within the context of a seemingly hostile political environment. Through qualitative focus group and follow-up diary and interview data, organized in friend groups and grounded in their popular culture, this project explores when and under what conditions different popular entertainment media may be a resource for playful political engagement or participation in the public sphere. Further, I explore when these media are alternatively, or additionally, used as a tool for active avoidance within this seemingly hostile political environment.

These questions are first explored via discussions around participants’ entertainment television and popular music, culminating in the conceptualization of a “Goldilocks zone of political play,” with which I theorize the opportunities for and constraints around playful political engagement through popular culture. To explore such political play, I analyze young people’s engagement with celebrity and cancel culture via a typology of celebrity cancelation to illuminate the variable levels of public-ness with which young people play (e.g., counter-/sub-/weak/dominant public or civil spheres). I further theorize the processes of and motivations behind such political play through popular culture in this analysis of celebrity cancel culture. Finally, through an analysis of young people’s interactions with/in online spaces, I theorize the forms such playful engagement with politics may take: cultivation and connection through similarity, and cohabitation and confrontation with difference. Building on participant discussions on memes, I then turn to explore the implications of such play.

Thus, this dissertation theorizes popular entertainment media as a site of political play, explored through data on young people’s media and everyday talk with friends. Ultimately, I theorize such playful engagement with politics, via popular entertainment media and in this contemporary (“hostile”) moment, in terms of competitive games, or what Huizinga (1955) theorizes as the agon. I consider and frame these findings and their implications relative to Mouffe’s alternative to liberalism, “agonistic pluralism,” and the antagonism that threatens such pluralism (1999; 2000; 2005; 2013). Taking this popular play with contentious politics seriously, both agonistic and antagonistic, I illuminate a nuanced, complex environment of avoidance and engagement, silence and deliberation, hostility and pleasure, and creative, active play within the democratic public sphere.