Living with Cosmopolitan : An Empirical News Audience Study of Transnational Young Professionals and Their Multiple Mobilities

With a general concern for the role played by media and communication in individuals’ mobility in a world where national borders are dissolving and people’s lives are becoming increasingly mediated, this empirical study sought to investigate a group of transnational young professionals’ daily news consumption and their mobile life experiences by conducting face-to-face interviews with target individuals in both Thailand and Sweden, and combining the results with an analysis from a theoretical perspective enlightened by cosmopolitanism and cultural capital. The study identified a set of distinctive news consumption tastes and multiple mobilities possessed by the interviewees. It demonstrates that news consumption can: 1) directly affect the mobile young professionals’ corporeal mobility by providing information about potential movement opportunities; 2) increase their social mobility by enabling them to accumulate cultural capital; and 3) expand their imaginative mobility by increasing their visuality of the multiple communities to which they belong. Conversely, any change in their multiple mobilities is reflected in a corresponding change in their choices of news consumption.