Media Rituals : A Critical Approach

The media are 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 does the media forge a public sense of community and shape people's private actions - or make us believe 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 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 less, because the possibilities of participation in media production are more evenly shared.