Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

‘para-social’ interaction, Couldry discusses the ritualized meeting between

the ‘media person’ (celebrity) and the ‘ordinary person’ (media consumer)

in which audiences live their world of values through the celebrity at the

same time as the celebrity somehow comes to stand in for, and provide a

pivotal window into, social life (26–7).

This concentration of symbolic power is, for Couldry, more pronounced

in the modern media than in any other social institution (like church and

education). He favours ‘[a] strongconcept of symbolic power... [which]...

would insist that some concentrations of symbolic power (for example, the

concentration from which contemporary media institutions benefit) are so

great that they dominate the whole social landscape’ (39).

Couldry sees media as supplying a late-modern ‘myth of the centre’.^19

He describes a condition in which every member of modern societies

believes that the media are our ‘access point to society’s centre’. This is,

of course mythical, yet, to the extent that it is universally accepted, also

very powerful. The media themselves also enjoy a virtual monopoly over

the power of naming (43),^20 and ‘defining-the-situation’. However, this

power is not a kind of hegemony in the Gramscian sense, or even the kind

of ‘will to truth’ which Foucault formulates; instead it is much more a

relation to the media’s status as an institution in the neo-Durkheimian

sense, rather than in the political spirit.

Because society’s symbolic resources are ver y unequally distributed (with

media institutions being the main beneficiaries of that inequality), these

ongoing conflicts of definition are marked by symbolic violence: certain def-

initions have enough weight and authority to close offmost other alterna-

tives from view, although such closure can never be total and is always, in

principle, open to challenge. (43)

The rest of Couldry’s book looks at genres of media where this authority

can stamp itself the heaviest: the ‘liveness’ of the media event, the ‘reality’

TV show, and the way in which fan clubs, in defining themselves purely

in terms of media, ritually reproduce the ‘myth of the centre’.

The distinction between ‘levels’ of integration

Couldry’s book is very useful for affirming and renewing the significance

of the concept of social integration and how it is related to ritual in media

societies. However, in a given society, ‘social integration’ need not be seen

to occur in a singular homogeneous space that changes over time.^21

Rather, we can also point to perspectives which propose that individuals

can source their sense of integration from a range of levels of association,

which primarily differ in their degree of ‘abstraction’ in space and time,

from embodied forms of intimacy to the generalization of ‘action at a dis-

tance’ which characterizes contemporary global culture.

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