The Crisis of Public Communication, 1995–2017

The article asks where stands the notion of a crisis of public communication, first promulgated by Blumler and Gurevitch in 1995, in the new communications ecology of 2017. Its focus is a “crisis of communication for citizenship.” It maintains that the sources of that crisis, spotted in 1995, still apply and have been joined by others. However, today’s political communication system has been radically transformed by digitisation, social media and the Internet, allied to accelerating and multi-faceted currents of social change. Its pluses and minuses for effective citizenship are canvassed in detail. Despite the opening up of many constructive avenues, in two fundamental respects, the prevailing system is still enmeshed in crisis.