Conceptualizing Communicative Citizenship in the Fragmented Public Sphere of the Media City: A Meta-Synthesis Approach

Abstract

This study conceptualizes communicative citizenship within the fragmented public sphere of the media city. As urban life becomes deeply entangled with platforms, data infrastructures, and algorithmic systems, classical citizenship—primarily defined through legal rights, duties, and institutional participation—has become insufficient for explaining contemporary forms of civic agency. Using a qualitative meta-synthesis, 32 scholarly documents selected through a PRISMA-guided screening process were critically interpreted across communication studies, urban sociology, platform studies, and critical smart-city research. The synthesis identifies five interrelated themes: the paradigmatic transformation of citizenship; the media city as a hybrid space of power; the political economy of platforms and extraction; the digital public sphere as a simultaneous site of enablement and constraint; and critical smart-city governance. Across these themes, communicative citizenship emerges as a dynamic position generated through the interaction of structure, agency, and context. It ranges from the passive citizen-as-data, whose everyday activity is converted into economic value, to the active citizen-as-network or communicative citizen, capable of dialogue, mobilization, meaning-making, and participatory regulation. The findings suggest that communicative citizenship is not a fixed legal status but a contested process shaped by unequal infrastructures, platform monopolization, algorithmic governance, and citizens’ capacity for critical engagement. Equitable access to communication infrastructures, critical media literacy, and protection of urban-media spaces for dialogue are therefore central conditions for strengthening communicative citizenship.