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

Author:Couldry, Nick [Couldry, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

6

Media and the Transformation of Capital and Authority

If everything is mediated and, as Sonia Livingstone puts it, media ‘reshap[e] relations not just among media organizations and their publics but among all social institutions – government, commerce, family, church, and so forth’,1 what are the consequences for the space of the social? The relationship media/society cannot be conceived in a linear way. Media do not have discrete ‘effects’ on society: for ‘society’ itself merely points to a whole mass of interconnecting and overlapping processes, many of which are now dependent on, or saturated with, media. I use the term ‘the space of the social’ not primarily in a geographical sense but to refer to the underlying possibilities of social organization. As in the last three chapters, questions of national differences will quickly emerge.

A crucial concept here will be that of ‘field’. In his work on fields from the 1970s and 1980s, Pierre Bourdieu had theorized the plurality of social space and value. Boltanski’s critiques of Bourdieu’s treatment of value and social power (see chapter 1) are no reason to abandon Bourdieu’s analysis of society as comprising many more or less discrete fields of competition for resources or ‘capital’. Early in his career Bourdieu defined ‘capital’ in Marxist terms as ‘accumulated labour which, when appropriated on a private, i.e. exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labour’.2 By the time we reach Bourdieu’s later work, ‘capital’ has become a more flexible concept, covering a range of possible resources. Going beyond Marx, Bourdieu distinguishes a number of fundamental types of capital (economic, social, cultural, symbolic) that work in all fields.3 We can draw on Bourdieu’s concepts of field and capital to develop our investigation of how media processes have consequences for social resources and larger forms of organization.

It is by considering media’s role in particular fields of practice that we may start to make sense of Mark Fishman’s apparently exaggerated claim that ‘the world is bureaucratically organized for journalists.’4 We will also get a better understanding of the significance in wider power relations of global media formats, such as Pop Idol and the UK show Jamie’s School Dinners.

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