Media Rituals: Follow the Bodies (original) (raw)
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Media Quasi-Rituals of Contemporary Society
2013
Most research on mass media, multimedia, even new media, has been moving away from the paradigm that reduced them to a communicative function. Having a theoretic starting point in Van Gennep’s analysis and the points of view of Birmingham group , the attention has shifted to more actors and contexts creating different meanings in the forums/fora. Thus, a possible way of enhancing the content of media concept is to associate it to quasi-rituals/daily media routine (observing how media/multimedia/new media influence human practices, program, habits, etc.) and to the contexts in which various ceremonies, forms of worship or mere rituals are mediatezed. The latter get transformed when conveyed through media and we comment upon this aspect. Due to this approach and further studies, the main benefit might be an insight into how creativity and constraint are combined inside this rather new cultural frame. Everyday use of the media can be seen as an integral part of a kind of magic spell co...
Mediatized Rituals: Understanding the Media in the Age of Deep Mediatization
International Journal of Communication, 2019
In this article, I propose the concept of mediatized ritual as a conceptual update to media events and media rituals. With this concept, I intend to better address the ritualistic orientation that privileges an increasingly mediatized social reality constructed through algorithmic collection, processing, and (re)presentation of data and metadata by communication technologies. I argue that to understand mediatized ritual, the media must be understood not as genres or media institutions, but as (1) the technological affordance and human practices of networked access to information and (2) the social perception of tamper-resistance of information, which construct the social reality in a mediatized manner. Blockchain technology and its social nature are analyzed as an example of the utility of the concept. The sociological implications regarding rituals, trust, normalcy, and power-relationship are also discussed.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. , 2019
For millennia, the idea that rituals create a shared and conventional world of human sociality has been commonplace. From common rites of passage that exist around the world in various forms (weddings, funerals, coming-of-age ceremonies), to patterned actions that seem familiar only to members of the in-group (secret initiations, organizational routines), the voluntarily performance of ritual encourages people to participate and engage meaningfully in different spheres of society. While attention to the concept was originally the purview of anthropology, sociology, and history, in recent decades many other academic disciplines have turned to ritual as a ‘window’ on the cultural dynamics by which people make and remake their worlds. In terms of journalism studies in particular, the concept of ritual has been harnessed by scholars looking to understand the symbolic power of media to direct public attention, define issues and groups, and cause social cohesion or dissolution. Media rituals performed in and through news coverage indicate social norms, common and conflicting values, and different ways of being ‘in the world’. The idea of ritual in journalism is accordingly related to discussions around the societal power of journalism as an institution, the ceremonial aspects of news coverage (especially around elite persons and extraordinary ‘media events’), and the different techniques journalists use to ‘make the news’ and ‘construct reality’. Journalism does more than merely cover events or chronicle history – it provides a mediated space for audiences and publics that both allows and extends rituals that can unite, challenge and affect society.
In each social structure, whether it was simple, or complex, a type of bond, or bonds, hold this structure together. Emile Durkheim tried to understand how complex social structures are held. By recognizing the social origin of religion, he argued that religion acted as a source of identification and solidarity for individuals, as social actors within a social realm, especially as a part of 'mechanical solidarity' systems, and to a less extent, but still important extent in the context of 'organic solidarity'.
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Mediatized rituals: beyond manufacturing consent
Media, Culture & Society, 2006
The study of mediatized rituals challenges entrenched theoretical views about media power, its locations and determinations and the role of media in processes of manufacturing consent. Contrary to both Durkheimian and neo-Marxian traditions (historically the dominant frameworks in the field of ritual study), some mediatized rituals appear to open up productive spaces for social reflexivity and critique, and can be politically disruptive or even transformative in their reverberations within civil and wider societies. This article identifies and critically discusses six subclasses of mediatized ritual and produces an overarching schema of use in their empirical analysis and comparative theorization. It argues against the deep theoretical suspicions within current academic media discourse toward ritual, and illustrates how mediatized rituals are in fact complexly variegated, exceptional and performative phenomena that periodically summon solidarities and moral ideas of the ‘social good...
Media and the Sacralization of Leaders and Events: The Construction of a Religious Public Sphere
Open Theology
This study aims to demonstrate that media can achieve a religious construction of an event or issue and set the public sphere in a religious frame through the sacralization of events and persons. This perspective can be supported empirically by the studies showing the way in which mass media framed different events in a religious imaginary and language and proposed this image as a frame for public sphere debates and theoretically by the concepts of media events, mediatization, ritualization, and sacralization, in order to reveal the processes through which the translation from a secular discourse to a religious discourse is produced. Under certain circumstances, mass media work as an “as if” (metaphoric) religion, and the events are presented through a religious frame – through themes and figures that come from the religious sacred narratives. Journalists accomplish this by setting events and leaders within the symbolic frame specific to religion: within this framework, those who re...
The anthropology of media and the question of ethnic and religious pluralism
Social Anthropology, 2011
This essay discusses anthropological approaches to the study of media interacting with contexts of ethnic and religious diversity. The main argument is that not only issues of access to and exclusion from public spheres are relevant for an understanding of media and pluralism. Background assumptions and ideologies about media technologies and their functioning also require more comparative analysis, as they impact public spheres and claims to authority and authenticity that ultimately produce and shape scenarios of ethnic and religious diversity. This additional dimension of diversity in the question of media and ethnic and religious pluralism is particularly apparent in crises of political and religious mediation. The latter often result in desires to bypass established forms of political and religious mediation that are in turn often projected on new media technologies.
Building a Collective Memory on Individual Lives: Obituary as a New Genre in 21st Century China
Media and Politics: Discourse, Cultures, and Practices, 2017
China has a long tradition of elegiac literature but ‘obituary’ as genre published on the newspaper is something new. In 1905, Tianjin’s Dagongbao welcome obituary as a sign of civilization. At the beginning of the 21th century several newspapers started to publish obituary. Among them the Beijing News (Xin Jing Bao) that in 2005, March 29th, under the heading “Shizhe 逝者 (Obituary)”, started a new column dedicated to death people. As in many other cases, the model of the new feature is drawn from western, especially American media, but it has also its own Chinese characteristic. The big novelty is that for the first time simple citizens, i.e. normal people (laobaixing) are the protagonist on the stage. Since the beginning, the new “Obituary” has been seen by readers, professionals, scholars, as a way to cherish, respect, give dignity to the life of every single person, regardless of his/her high or modest social position. Central to this new trend is the concept of minsheng xinwen, i.e. news connected to the life of the people. Beyond a renewed interest with individual, in today China, where the gap between different social groups is broadening, death people seem to be displayed as good examples to give a new meaning to life. In this perspective, the paper analyze “Obituary” of Xin Jing Bao, a collection of 100 obituaries published as a book in 2010.