Listening Beyond the Echoes: Media, Ethics, and Agency in an Uncertain World by Nick Couldry

Author:Nick Couldry [Couldry, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317256618
Google: 5R4eCwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 28132636
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2006-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Refiguring What We Know

First, I need to give more substance to my claim that just as important as new empirical investigations into media and terrorism (at least right now) are reframing and reconfiguring what we already know about the global media landscape that provided the long-term context for September 11.

A Long-Known Injustice

My starting point is not the media imperialism and cultural imperialism debates so much (for it is only the essential insight from those debates on which we draw), but an area of media theory with which those debates are rarely if ever connected: I mean work on the “ritual mode of communication” (Carey, 1989). James Carey in his well-known discussion argued that most communication analysis had seen media merely as the “transmission” of images and information across space, thereby ignoring another, and arguably more fundamental, dimension of media: media’s continuous role in sustaining societies in time. It was the latter that Carey called the “ritual mode of communication.” Since the media/cultural imperialism analyses came out of the political economy tradition, which has generally concentrated upon transmission,5 it is hardly surprising that the importance of Carey’s work for political economy, and for the GIO, has never been developed. But the connections are important.

The heart of Carey’s discussion is a simple, but crucial, point: that media over time, and through countless complex influences, construct “reality,” what passes for our “social reality.” As he puts it: “Communication is a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired and transformed” (Carey, 1989: 23); and elsewhere: “Reality is a scarce resource … the fundamental form of power is the power to define, allocate and display this resource” (Carey, 1989: 87).

Carey’s work is rich but at times ambiguous in pursuing this insight’s implications for an analysis of media power. Although sometimes he has foregrounded the conflictual dimension of the media’s ritual mode and although, in the second passage quoted in the previous paragraph, he is explicit about the contests for the power to construct reality that underlie whatever consensus media sustain, at other times these dimensions of conflict are less prominent in his work. This tendency to downplay conflict is a feature of the whole Durkheimian approach to media, which I have analyzed critically elsewhere (Couldry, 2003a). Once again, it is only the essential point of Carey’s argument—not its details—that concern us here.

Carey’s implied definition of media power—the power to construct and define social reality—is shared not only by other writers straightforwardly sympathetic to Durkheim’s theories of the social bond (Dayan and Katz, 1992), but also by anthropologists and sociologists who have sought to adapt the Durkheimian framework to analyzing power and conflict. There are a number of authors I could discuss here, but to keep the discussion brief I will mention just one, Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s definition of symbolic power—“the power of constructing reality” (1990: 166)—tracks Carey’s terminology, but it places it more directly in a space of conflict and politics.

The social function of … symbolism … is an authentic political function which cannot be reduced to the structuralists’ function of communication.

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