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In this article, the authors analyze the field of cultural consumption in the United States. Using the 2000 DDB Lifestyle Study, they examine a cross-section of Americans in terms of their occupational categories, media usage, consumption practices, social behaviors, and indicators of civic and political engagement. In doing so, the authors find many parallels to the determinants of taste, cultural discrimination, and choice within the field structure observed by Bourdieu in 1960s French society. However, there are also some notable differences in terms of the composition of cultural capital consistent with the concept of omnivorousness. The distribution of positions is largely defined by patterns of taste that discriminate between refinement, moderation, nurturance, and a communal orientation, on one side, and coarseness, excess, aggressiveness, and an individual orientation, on the other. Historical and national differences partly account for this variation, but a major role may be played by the increasing formation of identities around media and consumption, leading to a more gendered and ideological positioning of taste cultures in the U.S context. Keywords: Bourdieu; correspondence analysis; high culture; cultural capital; middlebrow; omnivore; political participation; popular culture

As consumer culture pervades the social life of citizens in America and Europe, it becomes increasingly important to clarify the relationship between consumption and citizenship. With this in mind, faculty and students at the University of Wisconsin organized a conference titled ''The Politics of Consumption/The Consumption of Politics.' Held in October 2006, the meeting provided a forum for leading scholars to discuss the interplay of markets, media, politics, and the citizen-consumer. Revised and expanded versions of the papers they presented are collected in this volume with the goal of advancing this emerging area of inquiry. It is our hope that the essays and research papers we have collected here help define the next wave of theory building and research inquiry on file intersections of consumer culture, civic culture, and mass culture. Keywords: citizen-consumers; competitive consumption; civic engagement; lifestyle politics; materialism; political branding; socially conscious consumption; taste cultures

Electronic communication and information technology have a chance to radically affect how citizens practice democracy. The questions for the modern media researcher should center upon how the electronic model of communications and traditional media forms will counteract and reinforce each other. From the early evidence on computer networks, people are constructing new areas of political discussion over these networks, and are using them as an alternative to traditional news broadcasting and print journalism.

This article analyzes five main groupings of world television news organizations: national broadcast networks, international TV news agencies, regional news exchanges, global satellite networks, and regional satellite vernacular networks. Key news organizations and the relations among them are analyzed to demonstrate an emerging web of global television that is both vertically and horizontally structured.

This article asks whether the concept of community is of continuing relevance in a postindustrial society that is rapidly advancing to a networked form of social organization. The author argues that community is necessary for democratic life to function, and asks what new forms of integration might emerge to create the boundaries necessary for community reproduction. Turning to Habermas's theory of communicative action, the author shows the relevance of the two-level concept of society, system, and lifeworld for addressing this question, and proposes the concept of the communicatively integrated community as a framework for understanding the central role of communication in producing community. Finally, the article offers a mid-range analytic theory of community communication ecology as a frame for connecting this larger theory to the specific analysis of communication and community.