Abstract
Over the last 10–15 years, Western societies have faced two interrelated social changes: the digitalization of media and the increase in socio-political polarization. While their relationship is causally reciprocal, population-level empirical studies focusing on over-time change remain scarce. We adopt the temporal perspective on the socio-political stratification of media usage in the context of Finland, one of the so-called Nordic media welfare states. We ask whether the ways in which media usage is socially stratified has changed from 2007 to 2018 and whether there is political polarization of media consumption. We draw on two nationally representative comparative surveys, collected in 2007 ( N = 1388) and 2018 ( N = 1425), and show that the main media usage patterns—the wide, the narrow, and the Internet-focused media repertoires—differ both in terms of their sociodemographic and political profiles and that the opposition between the wide and the narrow repertoires becomes increasingly polarized.
Highlights
Over the last 10–15 years, Western societies have faced two interrelated social changes: the digitalization of media and the increase in socio-political polarization
The reinforcement effect is more straightforward because it can be considered similar to the “social stratification” of the cultural consumption model typically deployed by sociologists of culture, but with “the political” added among other variables on the stratification side
From among divergent definitions of polarization found in the literature, we use the concept of polarization in a simple sociological sense to refer to a temporal process regarding whether social and political differentiation of media usage has become more sharply pronounced over time (e.g. DellaPosta, 2020; DiMaggio et al, 1996)
Summary
Over the last 10–15 years, Western societies have faced two interrelated social changes: the digitalization of media and the increase in socio-political polarization. Even if the link between media (especially social media) and polarization ( defined) has recently been a much-debated issue (Tucker et al, 2018), population-level empirical studies focusing on the socio-political stratification of media usage from the perspective of change over time—like ours—remain scarce (see, Koiranen et al, 2019) This is the case especially regarding the period of the last 10 or 15 years (the historical context of this study) marked by rising socioeconomic inequalities (Savage et al, 2015), the increasing popularity of social media, and the concerns about it leading toward a more strongly polarized political culture or “echo chambers” of the like-minded (Kearney, 2019; Vihma et al, 2018), and a rapid digitalization of culture and the subsequent forms of digital divides (Mihelj et al, 2019)
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