Media Rituals

<p><em>Media Rituals</em> 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.<br>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.</p>