Media Rituals Av Nick Couldry

<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.