Media, Voice, Space and Power: Essays of Refraction

Description

Nick Couldry is one of the world’s leading analysts of media power and voice, and has been publishing widely for 25 years. This volume, published 20 years after The Place of Media Power, brings together a rich collection of essays from his earliest to his latest writings, some of them hard to access, plus two previously unpublished chapters. The book’s 15 chapters cover a variety of themes from voice to space, from Big Data to democracy, and from art to reality television. Taken together, they give a unique insight into the range of Couldry’s interests and passions. Throughout, Couldry’s commitment to connecting media research to wider debates in philosophy and social theory is clear. A substantial Afterword reflects on the common themes that run throughout his work and this volume, and the particular challenges of grasping media’s contribution to social order in an age of datafication. A preface by leading US media scholar Jonathan Gray sets these essays in context. The result is an exciting and clearly-written text that will interest students and researchers of media, culture and social theory across the world. Cover Half Title Title Copyright Contents List of figures Preface: analysis without sorting hats Acknowledgements Part I Speaking up and speaking out 1 Speaking up in a public space: the strange case of Rachel Whiteread’s House 2 Global magics, local discretion 3 Speaking about others and speaking personally: reflections after Elspeth Probyn’s Sexing the Self 4 The individual “point of view”: learning from Bourdieu’s The Weight of the World Part II Spaces of media, spaces of exclusion 5 Remembering Diana: the geography of celebrity and the politics of lack 6 Passing ethnographies: rethinking the sites of agency and reflexivity in a mediated world 7 The umbrella man: crossing a landscape of speech and silence 8 On the set of The Sopranos: “inside” a fan’s construction of nearness 9 Teaching us to fake it: the ritualised norms of television’s “reality”-games 10 Class and contemporary forms of “reality” production, or hidden injuries of class, 2 Part III Democracy’s uncertain futures 11 Form and power in an age of continuous spectacle 12 Living well with and through media 13 What and where is the transnationalised public sphere? 14 A necessary disenchantment: myth, agency and injustice in a digital world 15 Media in modernity: a nice derangement of institutions Afterword: refracting power in an age of Big Data Index