The Glasgow University Media Group (GUMG) is hosting the launch of the new book by Director, Catherine Happer, who will be in discussion with Tom Mills from Aston University and Lluis de Nadal Alsina from the University of Glasgow.  

3:30pm, Tuesday, 3rd December, in the Bridie Library, Glasgow University Union (GUU) 

The Construction of Public Opinion in a Digital Age, Catherine Happer (Manchester University Press)

Drawing on work from her new book, in this seminar Happer presents a new model for understanding how media and communications interact with politics, culture, and everyday experience to construct people’s ideas, opinion and thought. She locates these processes in a time of constant political crises, when new technologies are changing how we access information and questions of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ are being radically reworked.  Rooted in the findings of empirical studies conducted over a decade, she identifies a growing ‘disconnect’ between a neoliberal media and political class and the public they serve –  ripe for exploitation by rightwing political actors but ultimately under the management of Big Tech who control the digital space.  Broadening the analytical lens to include these expanded circuits of communication, she explores how new mechanisms for controlling thought and opinion limit the potential for social change – and how that might be resisted.

Catherine Happer is Director of the GUMG and lead of the Media, Culture & Society subject group in the Division of Sociological and Cultural Studies. She is co-author of Trump's Media War and of Communicating Climate Change and Energy Security: News Methods in Understanding Audiences, with the late Greg Philo. She previously worked at the BBC in Documentaries and Factual programme-making.