Media Rituals A Critical Approach

"Media Rituals" rethinks our accepted concepts of ritual behavior for a media-saturated age. It connects ritual directly with questions of power, government, and surveillance and explores the ritual space which the media construct and where their power is legitimated.

Drawing on sociological and anthropological approaches to the study of ritual, Nick Couldry applies the work of theorists such as Durkheim, Bourdieu and Bloch to a number of important media arenas: the public media event; reality TV; Webcam sites; talk shows and docu-soaps; media pilgrimages; and the construction of celebrity. In a final chapter, he imagines a different world where the media's ritual power is lessened, due to the possibilities of a more evenly shared participation in media production.

Media Rituals rethinks our accepted concepts of ritual behaviour for a media-saturated age. It connects ritual directly with questions of power, government, and surveillance and explores the ritual space which the media construct and where their power is legitimated.Drawing on sociological and anthropological approaches to the study of ritual, Couldry applies the work of theorists such as Durkheim, Bourdieu and Bloch to a number of important media arenas: the public media event; reality TV; Webcam sites; talk shows and docu-soaps; media pilgrimages; the construction of celebrity. In a final chapter, he imagines a different world where the media's ritual power is less, because the possibilities of participation in media production are more evenly shared.

Figures and Plates Preface 1. Media Rituals: The Short and the Long Route 2. Ritual and Liminality 3. Ritual Space: Unravelling the Myth of the Centre 4. Rethinking Media Events 5. Media 'Pilgrimages' and Everyday Media Boundaries 6. Live 'Reality' and the Future of Surveillance 7. Mediated Self-Disclosure: Before and After the Internet 8. Beyond Media Rituals? References Index

Nick Couldry lectures in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of The Place of Media Power and Inside Culture.