Cosmopolitan Divide? : Examining the Tension Field Between Media, Residential Patterns and Cosmopolitan Attitudes

Abstract:   Today, global media such as the Internet provides media audiences scattered across the globe with the possibility of cross-cultural moral interaction upon a plethora of global digital public spheres. Such trends have been the catalyst for increased academic attention to the field of media and morality and the notion of media audiences as global citizens – ‘cosmopolitans at home’, consuming a wide array of mediated, global images and thus enforcing a proximity with the ‘distant Other’. Parallel to such trends is the dichotomous relationship between rural- and urban areas that have emerged as increasingly ambivalent in ‘network society’. Due to the ‘urbanization of media culture’ and the ‘digital divide’, it is argued that rural areas, in an era characterized by global interconnectedness, are rendered dysfunctional. On the other hand however, media can be argued to promote inclusion and new possibilities for rural people.   This study set out to empirically examine the tension field between residential patterns (rural/urban), the media (Internet) and cosmopolitanism. Setting out from the research questions: (1) What variables determine a ‘cosmopolitan outlook’ in Sweden?, (2) Does media use/access promote a ‘cosmopolitan outlook’, and under what circumstances?, and (3) Is there a ‘cosmopolitan divide’ between different residential patterns – and if so: how does it relate to different patterns of media use and access?. To attend the research questions, data from the annual national survey, Riks-SOM 2008, was analysed and the findings indicated the general trends for the Swedish cosmopolitan was, in accordance with other empirical accounts, young and well educated. Furthermore, respondents ‘high’ on Internet use where more likely to be cosmopolitans – confirming theoretical accounts of e.g. Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and Dick Hebdige. Also, ‘locality’ proved to be more important for rural people than for people living in metropolitan areas. Finally, men and women displayed different ‘cosmopolitan patterns’: rural women being more cosmopolitan than metropolitan women in terms of a ‘willingness to move to a country outside of Europe’ while men displayed the opposite, following the hypothesis.