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> 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