ABSTRACT

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a rich collection of essays from his earliest to his latest writings, some of them hard to access, plus two previously unpublished chapters.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.

part I|66 pages

Speaking up and speaking out

chapter 1|21 pages

Speaking up in a public space

The strange case of Rachel Whiteread’s House

chapter 2|9 pages

Global magics, local discretion

chapter 3|17 pages

Speaking about others and speaking personally

Reflections after Elspeth Probyn’s Sexing the Self

chapter 4|17 pages

The individual “point of view”

Learning from Bourdieu’s The Weight of the World

part II|88 pages

Spaces of media, spaces of exclusion

chapter 5|15 pages

Remembering Diana

The geography of celebrity and the politics of lack

chapter 6|16 pages

Passing ethnographies

Rethinking the sites of agency and reflexivity in a mediated world

chapter 7|19 pages

The umbrella man

Crossing a landscape of speech and silence

chapter 8|9 pages

On the set of The Sopranos

“Inside” a fan’s construction of nearness

chapter 9|14 pages

Teaching us to fake it

The ritualised norms of television’s “reality”-games

part III|89 pages

Democracy’s uncertain futures

chapter 12|15 pages

Living well with and through media

chapter 14|16 pages

A necessary disenchantment

Myth, agency and injustice in a digital world

chapter 15|17 pages

Media in modernity

A nice derangement of institutions

chapter |13 pages

Afterword

Refracting power in an age of Big Data