Jim Brown reviewed Media Rituals by Nick Couldry
Rituals of centralized media
It is interesting to read an argument from 2005 about centralized media (or "the media.") I always wonder what folks from this moment are thinking about today's internet, which is just as centralized as the broadcast networks that many hoped would be unseated by it.
The argument of this book is that we engage in a series of rituals that create and bolster the "myth of the mediated centre," which is "the belief, or assumption, that there is a centre to the social world, and that, in some sense, the media speaks ‘for’ that centre" (2). "The media" has most of the symbolic power, and that power is held in place via a range of rituals: "from certain ‘ritualised’ forms of television viewing, to people’s talk about appearing in the media, to our ‘automatic’ heightened attention if told that a media celebrity has just entered the room" (2).
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It is interesting to read an argument from 2005 about centralized media (or "the media.") I always wonder what folks from this moment are thinking about today's internet, which is just as centralized as the broadcast networks that many hoped would be unseated by it.
The argument of this book is that we engage in a series of rituals that create and bolster the "myth of the mediated centre," which is "the belief, or assumption, that there is a centre to the social world, and that, in some sense, the media speaks ‘for’ that centre" (2). "The media" has most of the symbolic power, and that power is held in place via a range of rituals: "from certain ‘ritualised’ forms of television viewing, to people’s talk about appearing in the media, to our ‘automatic’ heightened attention if told that a media celebrity has just entered the room" (2).
The conclusion to this book is really interesting. Here's a nugget from there that is especially interesting to users of Bookwyrm and other federated social media:
"The alternative vision of the media process we should work towards, then, is not a chaotic ‘Tower of Babel’, but a world with many ‘centres’ that produce and distribute media messages, each of them only a relative centre, in whose formation and operations a very wide range of people can participate, and which holds no entrenched monopoly that would prevent further ‘centres’ forming. Instead of the absurd nightmare of everyone broadcasting simultaneously, our alternative image of mediation could be a non-hierarchical space in which people have some degree of choice over whether to broadcast or to receive messages and images, at least for a significant number of purposes and contexts." (138)