Media Rituals Research Articles

Navigating Movie (M)apps: Film Locations, Tourism and Digital Mapping Tools

Navigating Movie (M)apps: Film Locations, Tourism and Digital Mapping Tools

Media Rituals in Eusébio’s Exequies

While celebrating collective representation, the media can be seen as spaces of ritualization that are fundamental to the consolidation of wider social values.
 In this paper we give an empirical frame to the concept of “media rituals” considering it as an entrenched symbolic practice that could be traceable in Eusébio’s exequies television broadcasting. Three sorts of media rituals are identified: rituals dealing with immediacy, rituals dealing with collective prominence and rituals dealing with the revelation of reality.
 Each media ritual exemplifies how a space of comprehensive ritualization is erected. It is through this generalized and mediated ritualization that the idea of a major social occurrence is refreshed and worked through.

A produção de listas de fãs: memória, influência e debate no “evento” do fandom

To date, there have been very few studies on fandom and fan audiences that have focused on practice of fans’ list-making. This article, which introduces this topic for analysis, first argues that fans’ list-making presents fans with an opportunity to simultaneously memorialize, influence, and argue. Second, this article offers list-making as a tool for observing commonalities between the different practices of media, music, and sports fans. Finally,this article cautions against the universality of these list-making practices, illustrating how list-making shows the artificiality of the event in fan activities. Using a combinationof Žižekian and Couldryian analyses, this article argues that fans’ list-making becomes a new way of reading fandom reductively, and highlights the media ritual of fandom.

Death of a king: digital ritual and diaspora

In an age of social networking, transnational diasporic communities are actively participating in the flow of new media and technology, becoming increasingly interconnected and in closer cultural proximity. With the death of the Tongan King Tupou V, Tongans are communicating, (re)connecting, exchanging information and cultural practices as they turn not just towards Tonga but towards diasporic spaces of connecting. Tapu as a cultural practice deeply rooted and situated within Tongan social life is being renegotiated digitally as digital ritual. This paper adds to the concept of digital diaspora by including a digital ritual component that reconfigures the formation and contestation of social space and proposes a distinct sociospatial orientation to digital technology. The ritual literature is engaged as digital rituals are considered a sub-genre of Couldry's media rituals. Distinct indigenous cultural practices within diasporic communities are reconstituted and structured through digital ritual engagement and participation in digital space. The Moanan (Oceanian) understanding of time and space as ‘tā’ and ‘vā’ lends to a genealogical theorizing of digital diaspora and social networking, resulting in a distinct sociospatial inhabitation of the Internet. Facebook for Tongans represents broad swathes of social connections we might conceptualize as a digital, portable homeland, which contests and rearticulates social relations through digitality.

Framing the Accused: The Perp Walk as Media Ritual

This qualitative project examines an American photojournalism ritual known as the “perp walk,” defined as the nonconsensual imaging of a person who is either in custody or otherwise legally obligated to attend a legal proceeding. The project draws from interviews, participant observation, and visual textual analysis to analyze perp walks within a constructivist paradigm. Framing theory and gatekeeping also inform the analysis, characterizing perp walks as cultural sites for both material and discursive struggle. The study found that the discursive framing of their portrayals seems most painful to the subjects of perp walks and that the materiality of image access causes photojournalists to ignore everyday competition and work as a team to complete perp-walk assignments.

The history of television celebrity: a discursive approach

This article makes a critical contribution to recent discussions of television celebrity. In particular, the article argues against the use of ‘celebrity’ as a general concept (with, in some accounts, a 250-year history) – of which the ‘TV personality’ is a particular variant. The focus here is on specific meanings of ‘celebrity’ alongside other terms that have been used to define ‘media people’ on television. Taking as its case study the UK TV listings magazine TV Times between 1955 and 1964, the analysis shows that the term ‘celebrity’ was used, alongside ‘personality’ and the much more ubiquitous ‘star’, to describe TV performers sometimes interchangeably but, as the nascent TV culture developed, with meanings that became increasingly specific. In this context, the term ‘celebrity’ was used to characterise the relationship between media performers and outsiders/ordinary people – where these people encountered TV performers or were themselves involved in TV programmes. Here ‘celebrity’ is not a general historical concept, but rather a term used to define an emerging popular culture, with TV a key focus for the development of contemporary ‘media rituals’.

Book Review: Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice, by Nick Couldry

Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice. Nick Couldry. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013. 311 pp. $23.70 pbk.This book's objective is threefold. One is to explore contribution to organization within of national and rapidly changing nature of those relations. Second is to assess how societies interconnect across national boundaries by using different models of communication exchange, and in process globalizing all aspects of social relations and exchange of information. Third is how digital practice reshapes these relations into institutionalized structures, forms, formats, and interfaces for disseminating content. By assessing changing nature of relations between and society, author makes a thought-provoking contribution to growing body of literature on multiplying role of and institutions not only in delivering information and social and cultural content, but also in reshaping relations between individuals and societies at all levels of communication.Nick Couldry specializes in and social theory with a focus on complex interaction between traditional and He has authored several books on changing nature of modern society and In this context, he analyzes modern as a and form and networking that transforms legitimacy of and authority of order, thus approaching media's contribution to our possibilities for knowledge, agency and ethics from a social theory standpoint.The book's eight chapters are designed to investigate how social theory can explain modern traditional and digital practice and their impacts on culture and social relations. The issue of impact of digital on globalization and changing world of mass communication has been quite widely discussed in Western literature over past two decades. Yet, author argues that there is room for another book that offers mid-range conceptual tools for understanding difference make in our lives. His main focus, however, is not only on infinite expansion of global connectivity but also on new hidden forms of disconnection that come to light as the social consequences of digital as he seeks to grasp the types of order-and disorder-that results from deep embedding in social space.The starting point for first two chapters is an assessment of heterogeneous bundle of practices for acting in world. His main argument is that media research center of gravity should move away from examining texts toward study of the broader set of practices related to media. Chapters 3 and 4 look at social impacts of in modern world as a media ritual and symbolic that shapes social reality, starting with the corporate owners and makers of brands. The author develops a body of evidence that in practice media as institution of social power and institutors of social form constructs reality, which in turn constructs our view of world, globalization, and our relations with it. …

Event Hiburan bagi Tki di Taiwan sebagai Pencitraan pada Anggota Komunitas

Event is still a useful media for building good image for certain communities. In addition to functioning as a media ritual, an event which is published through a live broadcast mass media will also increase the brand image of a particular product. Research question in this article is: what are the kinds of the TKI Event held in Taiwan in 2013 and what elements of the event that brings TKI enthusiastic in Taiwan? The method used in this study is a qualitative interpretive. The data was collected through direct observations and impressions of social media such as youtube as well as literature from the source journal from previous research literature or books that support research topic. Conclusion of the study states that the type of event held by workers in Taiwan is a talent contest and stage entertainment. While elements of the event that brings enthusiastic for workers is an event that displays imagery figure, and the appearance of celebrities.

The face of multiculturalism in Korea: Media ritual as framing in news coverage of Jasmine Lee

In 2012, Jasmine Lee, a minor media celebrity of Filipino origin, became the first non-Korean appointed to national office in the Republic of Korea. To understand the media’s framing of the meanings of this unprecedented event within the cultural context of South Korean race ideology, we analyzed all news and editorial coverage by the nation’s three largest English-language media outlets: The Korea Herald, the Korea JoongAng Daily, and The Korea Times. Using Victor Turner’s social drama theory as a methodology for this critical framing analysis, we focused on the use of on-line news sources by all three outlets. Explicating the framing process surrounding Jasmine Lee allowed us to understand the hegemonic role played by Korean journalism in the reproduction of the ongoing process of multiculturalism, as well as the media’s reproduction of its own powerful role in that cultural, ideological, economic, and legal process.

Folklore Music on Romanian TV. From State Socialist Television to Private Channels

Music genres rooted in folklore have often been interpreted as ideological manoeuvres to forge a sense of national identity (Gordy, Mihailescu, Baker, Cash). This article explores formalized folklore performances of muzica populara as forms ‘media rituals’ (Couldry), and focuses on the role that television has played in establishing the genre as we know it today. It analyses the link between muzica populara as rooted in mass participation activities during communism, and ‘media rituals’ as framed on television (Couldry), indiscriminately and democratically involving the entire population that it addresses (and is available beyond that).

Folklore Music on Romanian TV

Music genres rooted in folklore have often been interpreted as ideological manoeuvres to forge a sense of national identity (Gordy, Mihailescu, Baker, Cash). This article explores formalized folklore performances of muzică populară as forms ‘media rituals’ (Couldry), and focuses on the role that television has played in establishing the genre as we know it today. It analyses the link between muzică populară as rooted in mass participation activities during communism, and ‘media rituals’ as framed on television (Couldry), indiscriminately and democratically involving the entire population that it addresses (and is available beyond that).

‘Searching for a centre that holds’ in the network society: Social construction of knowledge on, and with, English Wikipedia

The communication model of the network society is not horizontal and flat. Different mediated constructions and centreing performances on new media platforms work towards integrating the symbolic environment, and towards representing the imagined mediated centres. Wikipedia aspires to become ‘the sum of all human knowledge’. Despite being built on anonymous contributions its underlying dynamic is a process of empirically traceable social construction of knowledge. A case study of English Wikipedia’s In the news (ITN) section will be presented. Through flexible mediated content production, based on the routinization of the process in policies and guidelines, Wikipedia constructs social centres through consensus-driven media rituals, based on the neutral point of view. Wikipedia has blurred the border between different types of knowledge in the process of ‘searching for a centre that holds’. It constantly negotiates the border between its internal collaboration and its external symbolic environment.

Give the Winds a Mighty Voice: Evangelical Culture as Radio Ecology

The Evangelical movement in the United States arose as an interpretive community in the late 19th century when the penny press permitted mass dissemination of shared media texts. Network radio in the early and mid-20th century then furnished an ecology for Evangelicals to share real-time media rituals and be socially integrated into a broadly coherent subculture. This study presents a new history of Evangelicalism organized around its media, following the movement through its three “waves.” In the present era, radio continues to sustain the subculture, even as Evangelicals have tactically “reread” their media texts in response to societal change.

Medical Rituals and Media Rituals

In the present article the author examines the ritual elements of the professionalization during medical studies, and its interference with media content of medical significance, comparing the role of medical and media rituals on the way of becoming a doctor. It is to be explored how these medical soap operas, medical dramas, medical thrillers or crime stories do exert influence on medical identity and role expectations. Do medical students and their relatives (with medical expertise frequently) identify themselves with these roles? Is their way of reception critical or naive? How media rituals are organizing, modulating the students' medical perception and expectations. Is there a mediated shadow initiation via media or it is excluded and denied? Does it perfuse the common social experience of becoming a doctor via peer communication and peer shaping of model behavior? We search the answers in the context of a theory of media rituals.

Social drama in the academic-media nexus: Journalism’s strategic response to deviant ideas

This article applies ‘social drama’ – adapted from the anthropology of Victor Turner – to portray a performance of media ritual in control of critical academic discourse. Insights from newspaper coverage of a controversy surrounding Ward Churchill allow us to trace theoretical connections between strategic ritual at the occupational level and media ritual in cultural practice. We observe a fractal-like structure, such that ritualistic punishment of deviant ideas as a cultural response is encoded in textual production. We discuss implications of social drama as media ritual for the prowess of US journalism in patrolling boundaries of acceptable ideas in the academic-media nexus.

Makeover television and the beauty myth

The media have an important role in communicating cultural values and ideas, but they also affect the outlining and defining the concepts of beauty. Therefore, the media representation processes are key to forming cultural 'norms' of a beautiful female body, while consumption oriented society finds esthetic surgery a simpler and faster way of democratizing and achieving this ideal. As a mixture of the mentioned motives, the makeover television is an example of media content whose analysis can uncover the meanings and affirmation mechanisms of the contemporary beauty myth - an idea suggested by Naomi Wolf. These TV shows can be viewed as particular media rituals, initiating into the myth and legitimizing its social role. Reality makeover TV show Moje novo ja, aired on Prva television, is analyzed to uncover the key moments of media representation of current idea(l)s of a desired woman's beauty, the consequences of such ideas and the social power relations which the myth itself portrays.

A Theory of Media Spectatuals: A Case Study of ‘India Against Corruption’ Demonstrations

The notion of media spectacles is largely woven around symbols and a largely passive audience. It, hence, becomes possible to look at media rituals and media spectacles as a thesis and an anti-thesis in the Hegelian sense. The media events in the classical sense are, thus, seen as links between communication technologies and social structures. They connect ‘portability, reproducibility, linearity and simultaneity’ to ‘empire, church, nation and market’. The live nature of the broadcast is shaped by the dialectics of performativity and passive consumption. Unlike the consumption of spectacles, spectatuals require the active participation of the audience in the event. As the spiral gathers more steam, so does the broadcast. Once the performative involvement of the audience is lost, the broadcasters lose interest in the event. Since, by definition, the spectatuals involve the dialectics of pre-planning and unpredictability, the turn of events, though shaped by the contours of the pre-plan, takes an unpredictable turn. The centre, in our case the Ramlila grounds, the venue of the fast, is dispersed throughout the country, both through real representation and in simulated forms, which are diffused outwards. Contradictions between reverent, awe-filled narration for the protagonist and anger against the ‘common enemies’ work together in the construction of the spectatual. The function of the spectatual is defined by the tensions between integration of society and the clamour for symbolic change - the passage of the Lok Pal bill in our example. The dialects of powerful media and loss of control too are evident in our case study of spectatuals.

Good grief: the role of social mobile media in the 3.11 earthquake disaster in Japan

While the deployment of social mobile media expands earlier modes of civic engagement and media, it also departs from previous media by providing various modes of networked visual and aural communication with greater affective personalisation. In news media of late, much has been touted about the agency of social and mobile media in the events of political uprising or at times of natural disasters and crisis management. While these events didn't happen because of social media, the media did impact upon how we experienced the situation. This leads us to ask: just how helpful are social mobile media in maintaining relationships in times of crisis management and how, if at all, do they depart from previous media and methods? Drawing from case studies conducted with participants living in Tokyo at the time of the horrific events surrounding Japan's earthquake and tsunami disaster of 11 March 2011 (3.11), as well as a historical discussion of media usage in times of crisis in Japan, this article reflects upon the role of new media in helping, if at all, people manage crisis and grief. We argue that while social media provides new channels for affective cultures in the form of mobile intimacy, it also extends upon earlier media practices and rituals such as the postcard.

Work, Power and Performance: Analysing the ‘Reality’ Game of The Apprentice

This article addresses the relationship between the British version of the reality television programme The Apprentice and the shifting working cultures of contemporary neoliberalism. It explores how the programme enacts, through ritualized play, many skills required by the ‘flexible’ work economy: emotional commitment, entrepreneurial adaptability, a combination of team conformity and personal ambition. In particular, it highlights how newly calibrated requirements of sociality, ‘passion’, and power-as-charisma are negotiated by the programme in relation to broader emergent norms of neoliberal governmentality. However, the article simultaneously argues against overly deterministic deployments of governmentality theory, suggesting it be both supplemented by other tools (media rituals and the affective role of passion), and reoriented back towards a Foucauldian emphasis upon the instability of power. This can, it argues, both enable the programme’s appeal to be more effectively understood and help us comprehend the spaces and places where neoliberal governmentality fails, wholly or partly, to be foregrounded.

Framing China and the world through the Olympic opening ceremonies, 1984–2008

This essay focuses on the coverage of the past seven Olympic Opening Ceremonies (1984–2008) through the lens of one national broadcaster: China Central Television (CCTV), which has been the sole Olympic TV rights holder within the Chinese mainland during this period. Through textual analysis of CCTV's live broadcast narrative, I hope to first shed light on how the concept of liminality may be used to analyze the coverage of a highly ritualized sports event. Second, I look for changes in the media's ritual practices and ritual language across these years and search for possible explanations.