Emancipatory Politics And Social Identity

Thus, a methodological program is demanded to construct a general theory from cumulative research findings and provide a comprehensive, reliable, up-to-date benchmark against which the existing variations can be examined. Another criticism on the existing studies was related to Harwood and Roy (2005)’s theory-building effort to link social identity theory with mass communication research. They emphasized the importance of the macro-level factors, referring to the broad contexts in which social identities are formed, such as media ownership, content control, and social and cultural conventions of a society (also see Reid, Giles, & Abrams, 2004; Smith & Phillips, 2006). The existing literature, however, overwhelmingly concentrated on the individual-level

H3b: Individuals who more frequently use internet to obtain information are more likely to identify themselves to global community.

The second task of this study was to investigate how macro-level contextual factors affect individual identification. Theoretically, Giddens (1991) argued that people’s identities are shaped by emancipatory politics and life politics. Emancipatory politics is a politics of life chances that liberate people by giving them the conditions to make choices and life politics is a politics of lifestyle choices that build up people’s identities through self-actualization. Emancipatory politics creates and defines the macro-level environment in which life politics operates. It focuses on divisive distribution of resources/power and aims to free people from the fixities of traditions and customs by eliminating or reducing exploitation, inequality, or oppression. Giddens (1991), meanwhile, saw Habermas’ (1987) idea of ideal-speech situation as an attempt to develop a communicative framework for emancipatory politics. He pointed

One is materialistic and concerned with resource accumulation and distribution while the other is informational and concerned with free speech. They were adopted and operationalized in this study as contextual factors. Specifically, the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI) was used to describe materialistic emancipation. The IHDI is annually published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to assess a country’s average achievements in three key dimensions of human development – life expectancy, education, and income. In particular, it is also concerned with how those achievements are distributed among its population by using its level of inequality to discount each dimension’s average value. The Freedom of the Press Index (FPI) was used to describe informational emancipation. It is an annual survey released by Freedom House, a US-based non-governmental organization, to assess the degree of print, broadcast, and internet freedom in every country in the world.

RQ1: How does the IHDI affect individual identification to local, national, and global communities?

RQ2: How does the FPI affect individual identification to local, national, and global communities?

The third task of this study was to explore how macro-level contextual factors moderate the individual-level relationship between media use and identification.

RQ3: How does the IHDI affect the relationship between