Routledge Media Rituals: A Critical Approach

Product Description 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. Review "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