Media Rituals

A Critical Approach

By: Nick Couldry

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Paperback | 19 December 2002 | Edition Number 1

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186 Pages

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23.39 x 15.6 x 1.02

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The media is an inescapable part of our everyday life. But how can we understand those times of excess when the media has a significance completely beyond the routine? At times of crisis or triumph, how do media force a public sense of community and shape people's private actions - or make us believe that they do? 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 constructs and where its 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; the construction of celebrity. In the 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.

Industry Reviews

"I find this to be a stimulating and promising project that has real potential to appeal to an academic and student audience that crosses a number of disciplinary boundaries."
-Ivan Karp, Emory University
"This is a very readable and important revision of the sociological study of the media. The author develops a concept of ritual that will be convincing to students raised in an age of a sometimes bewildering proliferation of reality-shaping media."
-George Marcus, Rice University

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