Media Rituals Research Articles

COMMUNICATING CARE - HEALING, THERAPY AND INFLUENCER PRACTICES ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Building on two case studies, this paper will discuss emerging healing, health and therapy cultures on social media and the role of (micro-)influencers within these cultures. While influencer cultures have become an important field of internet research over the last decade (see for example Abidin, 2015), scholars typically focus on commercial influencers in the context of fashion, beauty, travel, lifestyle genres, and adjacent genres. This paper contributes to extending how we imagine and theorise influencer practices and explores influencers and influencer practices that are motivated, arguably, by healing rather than financial or ideological ambitions. Theoretically, we consider how digital affect cultures enable influencers and followers to (re)create narratives about health, relate through resonance and engage with media rituals rather than merely seek information. As influencer practices and cultures continue to expand beyond popular or normative conceptualisations, this paper offers empirical accounts to open up the contexts and theories we use to explore influencer dynamics. Our paper is a starting point to invite conversation at the conference about the diversity of influencers and influencer cultures, how we might theorise their roles, and how care, healing, health and therapy is felt and communicated.

Rethinking affective publics as media rituals through temporality, performativity and liminality

This article calls for a rethinking of the formation of affective publics as a ritual process. Given the particularities of networked media, I suggest that media rituals extend into the formation of affective publics celebrating imagined collectivities in a fashion of collaborative storytelling. This is a transitional process in which a collectivity is validated, affirmed and reinforced through ritual actions. To illustrate this dynamic, I suggest drawing upon three key concepts (namely temporality, performativity and liminality), which are derivatives of media rituals theory, but also shed light on the dynamics of affective publics. To specify, first, ritual temporality refers to ambient concentrations that create a breach in the ordinary flow of media texts. Second, performativity implicates the affect-driven rhythms of digital storytelling feeding algorithmic curations that form an embodied harmony between participants and a sense of collectivity. Third, liminality entails ambiguous situations that enable the formation of affective publics by means of voluntary commitment, anonymity and the uniformity of participants. These concepts are the key entry points in capturing the ritual aspects of affective publics. Viewed through this lens, scrutiny for the ritual dynamics of networked publics helps us to grasp the affective formations of networked media.

Research on Large-Scale Sports Events Boosting Urban Tourism Development from The Perspective of Media Rituals

With the advent of the new media era, the research on the promotion of urban tourism development by large-scale sports events has gradually deepened, and its connotation and extension have shown an expanding trend. This study proposes a new framework for sports event tourism and introduces the concept of "media rituals" in communication. After sorting out the three interactive forms of sports, media, and tourism, the main mechanism of media rituals participating in sports event tourism is clarified. , and carried out explorations in three aspects: first, according to the presence or absence of media ritual intervention, a dual model of sports event tourists is proposed; second, the conceptual continuum of sports event tourism is constructed according to the level of media ritual intervention. From the perspective of ontology, this paper explores the particularity of sports event tourism that is different from other forms of tourism; thirdly, taking the Beijing Winter Olympics as a case, to sort out the value, predicament, and development path of large-scale sports event tourism under media ceremonies, aiming to It provides new ideas for sports event tourism marketing and academic research in the new media era.

A typology of social media rituals

AbstractGiven its massive volume and rapid development of new trends, the universe of user-generated content may seem utterly chaotic. Yet the flow of content is underlined by deep-rooted patterns of communication. In this article, we present the first systematic attempt to identify these patterns using the concept of social media rituals. Understood as typified communicative practices that formalize and express shared values, rituals offer a productive path to categorize popular genres of content and trace the values they convey. Integrating theoretical literature on rituals with empirical studies of social media genres, we develop a typology of 16 rituals that express diverse values, ranging from respect and responsibility to materialism and pleasure. Furthermore, we show that rituals embed different notions of good communication, as reflected in the values of authenticity, persuasion, affiliation, and demonstration. Finally, we discuss how our framework can facilitate comparative investigations of user-generated content and platform values.

State Building in Crisis Governance: Donald Trump and COVID-19.

State Building in Crisis Governance: Donald Trump and COVID-19.

The value(s) of social media rituals: a cross-cultural analysis of New Year’s resolutions

ABSTRACT New Year’s resolutions are acts of valuation where people express ideas about what is important and worthwhile in life. Although resolutions have a long history, the twenty-first century has transformed the practice into a social media ritual with greater visibility, interactivity, and reach. Using this unique event to explore the globalization of values, we analyze tweets about New Year’s resolutions in English, German, Italian, Japanese, and Korean. Combining network analysis (n = 160,592) and content analysis (n = 2000), we compare discursive topics, modes of ritual participation, and the values expressed in resolutions. Our findings indicate both that the ritual crosses cultures and that there are language-specific dynamics that do not map neatly onto established divisions between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ value orientations. Instead, we identify three underlying tensions organizing the articulation of values: self-acceptance vs. self-improvement, public vs. private, and conformity vs. oppositionality. We discuss these in relation to an overarching tension between local contexts and global platform cultures. Finally, we explore the study’s broader implications for understanding the interaction between values, norms, and global communicative practices.

The value(s) of social media rituals: a cross-cultural analysis of New Year's resolutions

The value(s) of social media rituals: a cross-cultural analysis of New Year's resolutions

Old Parameters/New Tricks: The place of celebrity journalism in persona construction (and what we might do about it).

Celebrity journalism is a founding discourse for the construction of persona. As the first mass-circulated media, journalism made celebrity a “very public form of discourse about the dimensions of what is public and what is private, and ultimately what is intimate” (Marshall 2014, p. xii). It created parameters for the construction and visibility of different facets of self-identity in public spheres (Connell 1992; Hartley 1996), which often perpetuate inequalities of social structures through offering narrow versions of self, for example against the priorities of capital (Littler 2004; Couldry 2000, 2002). This created an incessant focus on self-fulfilment through consumerism and display of consumption as if this was an accurate public reflection of who we are (Marshall 1997, 2010; deCordova 1990). As journalism naturalised and rationalised celebrity, together they created tools through which public personas became powerful cultural signifiers and props of the socio-economic and political systems in which we live. Celebrity journalism is a principal and founding characteristic of these systems, our collective understandings of self-identity within them, how we perform this to others, and the mediation of these things. As a genre, celebrity journalism ties together the contradictions of public and private dichotomies of capitalist democracies and humanises our place in it all. Journalism and celebrity helped develop the fabric of persona, establishing threads of politics and commerce, ordinary people made extraordinary through media rituals, interwoven public and private spheres, the constructions of reality and the celebration and contestation of new ideologies.

Media Rituals and Memory: Exploring the Historical Phenomenology of American Local Television

For more than two decades during the mid-20th century, local entertainment television shaped daily experience across the United States. Although often viewed as trivial by historians, these extinct television genres offer valuable insights into the relationship among media technology, historical consciousness, and cultural memory. Emergent theories of historical phenomenology help facilitate and expand such insights. The phenomenological perspective, which focuses on the sensory experience of media technology in historical settings, illustrates how audience memories inform the historical significance of this programming. The present study utilizes insights from ethnographic data and historical recordings to fortify its findings.

The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life by Lee Humphreys

Reviewed by: The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life by Lee Humphreys Hywel Dix (bio) Reviews 477 The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life Lee Humphreys MIT Press, 2018, 200 pp. ISBN 9780262037853, $30.00 hardcover. Much of the rapidly expanding research into the relationship between life writing and digital media has emphasized technological transformation and a corresponding epochal shift in how the self is constructed in different media over time. By contrast, one of the key arguments made by this timely book is that the public representations of selfhood that we associate with platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube are direct descendants of vernacular diary keeping, letter writing, and journaling in earlier periods. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak's Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online (2014) is a collection of essays that brings together life writing and new media studies with a largely contemporary focus. Taking a complementary approach, Humphreys in The Qualified Self looks in two directions at once: both back at the kinds of life writing that emerged as a result of earlier technological forms, and forward into the varieties of self-representation made possible by social media in the present. For this reason, the book usefully supplements other accounts that overly fetishize the transformative potential of new technologies, and it has immediately become an essential addition to the existing critical literature on digital life writing. The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life starts off by defining three key terms: account, accounting, and accountability. Humphreys prefers the term account to other concepts that have previously dominated the field such as narrative, testimony, or bearing witness because she suggests that an account is inherently tied to identity in a way that mediates between online and offline performances of selfhood, and between individual and collective affiliation. An account, in other words, implies a subject in process. In keeping with her overall emphasis on how the traces of selfhood expressed in contemporary social media correspond to earlier media practices of which they are in fact the descendants, she suggests that the writing of names and addresses in diaries, scrapbooks, and photograph albums in an earlier period were tantamount to the creation of particular forms of account that now exist in digital form. Accounting is then the name for the process of compiling lots of different media accounts, and by doing so documenting, chronicling, and cataloguing diverse kinds of experience. Accountability is the term she uses to inject a degree of ethical consideration into the process, since when we use social media we are "accountable to others for the traces we create . . . for the traces created about us by others" and "to others for the traces they create about themselves" (14). Chapter 2 examines the means by which everyday experiences are rendered normalizing and normative through sharing, which also has the effect of rendering them meaningful and hence imbues them with value and importance both for the person sharing and the community among whom the experience is shared. It situates social media accounting in the context of media rituals and routines more [End Page 477] broadly, concepts which are more anthropological in nature than the chapter overtly declares. Chapter 3 expands existing media research in the area of identity performance by arguing that the visual presentation of the self is a form of social interaction. This argument is situated in the context of technological change over the long term, and makes an explicit comparison between early Kodak photography and Instagram. Such an approach has the useful effect of debunking the myth that social media have created fundamentally new ways of performing identity by giving those media a substantial evolutionary prehistory. Chapter 4 is devoted to what Humphreys calls "remembrancing." In arguing that this is a practice employed by people to create media traces of momentous events, she suggests that creating accounts of such events can be seen as a means by which the process of remembering itself is highly mediated. Her discussion is again rooted in earlier forms of technology such as the hand-written diary or travel journal, and these are again usefully compared to more recent...

L’image-martyre. Réappropriations télévisuelles des vidéos d’amateur de l’attentat de Nice (2016)

The article aims at analysing the role of amateur videos in the communication of information, with regard to the special editions of the international TV news broadcasted the day after the terroristic attack of July 14 th 2016 in Nice. Against a backdrop characterized by a systematic occultation of death, the videos contribute to the celebration of the survivors, by means of their sound dimension. Those “martyrs-images” have a witness value and help exorcise the violent death within media rituals such as news broadcasts.

La participación ciudadana en los medios de comunicación y las normas culturales en torno a la radio Mugambo Jwetu FM

Community media have been lauded for the opportunity they provide to enhance participation and therefore democratic culture. In Kenya, a growing number of community radio stations have been founded partly under this logic since 2004. As of 2017, there were about 25 operational community radio stations. However, but exactly what participation consists of or what bottlenecks participation faces is not extensively laid out in either the country’s legislation or the stations’ best practices. This paper explores the daily interactions of a Kenyan ‘community radio community’ with the programmes of a radio station in their midst. It examines the media rituals at different times of the day by various sections of the community in relation to the content of the station, Mugambo Jwetu FM. Through this, the social norms that determine participation on one hand, and the new social formations that occur through participation on the other hand, are revealed. The data used are drawn from field research conducted in 2014 and 2015.

Forever In Our Hearts

This article charts the emergence of the births, deaths and marriages column in the colonial Australian press. Using Australia’s oldest continuing newspaper the Sydney Morning Herald as a case study, this article examines the evolution of the notices over a 25-year period from the newspaper’s first publication (as the Sydney Herald) in 1831. We argue that the births, deaths and marriages notices in the Herald were part of early attempts by colonists to reinforce their respectability before becoming a practice with widespread appeal that both announced key life events and marked people’s connection to place. Drawing on the scholarship of Pierre Bourdieu, our analysis pinpoints the moment these notices were ‘legitimised’ by the journalistic field and marked the birth of a media ritual in colonial Australian society. We provide historical insight into the ways in which the news media establish legitimacy in the social spaces they serve.

How to Use Gay Nazis in Job Interviews: Queer Media, Striptease-Lectures and the Art of Existential Sodomism

A video-performance on homoerotic nazism is transformed into a deranged guide of professional and erotic survival. Based on an actual interview with a gay Nazi, this project encompasses academic essays, lecture-performances and a series of digital and urban sensations. All these forms expression explore how social media can stage a horny war against fear, hatred and uncertainty. Physically and intellectually provocative, this is an analysis of the relationship between facebook, austerity-horror and queer desire. This polymedia project includes a short clip and ritualistic acts of self-exposure. This dialogue between storytelling and art-theory re-stages the shocking testimonies of the experimental short-film/video-performance (The Homonazi Effect). Centered on factual -- violent, flirty and cyber -- encounters with Athens-based gay neo-Nazis, the Homonazi Effect encompassed an alliance of platforms: blogs, queer festivals, popular magazines, academic writing and social media. Visual components of the artwork, and particularly, the author’s impersonations of his ‘homo-Nazi’ interlocutor were re-used and re-adapted with various storytelling and self-writing formats – co-creating a fragmented intermedia collage of confession and defeat. Social Media rituals twisted the meaning, context and impact of the initial story – re-situating its visual dramatics within an aesthetic backdrop of failed job interviews, zero-hour contracts and traumatic escapism. A cinematic narration dissolves into a project of self-writing, one that establishes an exhibitionistic archiving of failure. The boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, history and imagination and digital and non-digital dramaturgy collapse. A new queer utopia is now disruptively staged on the performative intersection of precarious routine and austerity-age dreamland.

Book Review: Stories without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event

Published a quarter of a century ago, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Dayan and Katz, 1992) is perhaps one of the most influential works in the history of media and communications studies. Since its original publication, the concept of media events has been dissected and debated by several scholars, who have praised Dayan and Katz for their emphasis on ‘outstanding’ episodes rather than on the ‘ordinary’ or ‘average’ (Hepp and Couldry, 2010: 2). Some of these authors have also pointed out the shortcomings of this seminal work, and have suggested alternative terminologies to understand those extraordinary occasions covered by – and often constructed in complicity with – the media, such as ‘media rituals’, ‘media spectacles’ or ‘popular media events’ (e.g. Cottle, 2006; Couldry, 2003; Hepp and Vogelgesang, 2003; Kellner, 2010). Part of the enduring allure of Media Events is evidenced by the fact that Dayan and Katz have at different times revisited their original ideas, in order to update them as well as to address some criticisms, as a recent special issue in this journal shows (Katz and Dayan, 2017; see also Dayan, 2008; Katz and Liebes, 2007).

Casting an ‘Outsider’ in the ritual centre: Two decades of performances of ‘Rural Migrants’ in CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala

Recent years have seen the rise of the ‘processual approach’ in media ritual studies, which focuses on the making of media rituals through various ‘ritualised actions’ rather than assuming them as isolated events distinctive to ordinary broadcasting. This article advances this line of argument by shedding light on a previously less-discussed form of ritualised action: the ritualised casting. It examines how the character of ‘rural migrant’ has been staged in the 28-year history of China Central Television’s Spring Festival Gala and how the casting of this ‘social outsider’ served as a dynamical strategy in the process of ritualisation of the Gala. The case study demonstrates a persistently central position of the image of ‘rural migrants’ in the Gala in the past 21 years, yet the scripting of this ritual subject varied as the agendas and crises of ritualisation shifted. This ritualised casting not only delivered a self-replicating effect that made the success of the Gala as natural and desired, but also, it exhibited a power to converge the media’s categories with other social categories, which further legitimised the ritual authority of the Gala as a mediated centre in the festival space of the Chinese New Year.

Staging a social drama: Ritualized framing of the spring festival homecoming in Chinese state media

The transformation of Chinese media from the propaganda organ of the Party-state to its central means of hegemony has given rise to typified news practices that vary in formality but cohere in functionality. Integrating theories of media ritual and framing, this study explores how Chinese state media ritualistically manufacture a public consensus on the interpretation of the annual Spring Festival homecoming, a chronic social problem that exposes socioeconomic inequalities and policy deficiencies. An analysis of the 2014 homecoming coverage on China Central Television (CCTV) reveals that state media create and popularize a state-sponsored social drama, reducing a complex, multifaceted social problem to a one-dimensional transportation crisis. This media ritual, in accordance with both the state’s mandate to maintain social stability and the media’s logic of commercial success, contains alternative interpretations and obscures the important social concerns encapsulated in this issue.

Festive television in the socialist world: From media events to media holidays

Abstract This article focuses on the ways in which socialist television sought to create a sense of extraordinary temporality out of the ordinary through its coverage of historical commemorations, national days, and secular and religious festivities. To do so, it develops the concept of ‘media holidays’, which draws on Dayan and Katz’s seminal notion of media events, and the work of other scholars of media ritual, to show the ways in which socialist television created extraordinary temporalities through scheduling. Drawing on schedule analysis and archival documents, the article compares the cases of television in East Germany, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. It examines a number of different kinds of media holiday on socialist television, and shows how different kinds of holidays and commemoration were marked with different kinds of programming in which entertainment played an important role.

Image Control: The Visual Rhetoric of President Obama

ABSTRACTPresident Barack Obama was elected upon a wave of change he described as “hope.” On the front of image control, the Obama administration has offered little hope in providing greater access to information compared to previous administrations, exemplified by the exclusion of photojournalists from a number of events. Using Althusser's Ideological State Apparatus and visual rhetoric, this analysis examines the process of image control and interprets official photographs from these events to argue against such practices. Findings suggest that photographer exclusion altered media rituals, allowed through White House power to change its relationship with the press and communicate directly with the public through new media channels. Image control seen in analyzed photographs produced mundane perspectives and presidential legitimacy conveyed in symbols and meanings that reinforce norms, and potentially lessen impact of race. Implications for Obama's legacy and future White House practices are discussed.

The construction of grievable death: Toward an analytical framework for the study of mediatized death

Death generates rituals that organize the social world and bring to the fore the relational ties individuals have with one another. The media not only constitute the space where some of these death rituals take place but also are pivotal institutions that provide moral orientation. This article is interested in death-related media rituals and the extent to which these propose a way for individuals to situate themselves within a broader, social and political structure. Inspired by Judith Butler’s discussion of grievability, the article introduces the analytics of mediatized grievability, which offers a way of studying and analyzing news about death. This analytical framework unpacks the notion of grievability and accounts both for the properties of mediatized death rituals and for the moral principles embedded in these. The framework offers a systematic method of analyzing news about death and identifying the ethical solicitation such news addresses to its spectators with regard to how they should feel and act in situations of distant death.