ABSTRACT
Media institutions have as their main asset symbolic power: a concentration of symbolic resources – crudely the power to tell and circulate stories about the world – that is historically unprecedented. But that symbolic power, however much its infrastructure depends on concentrations of economic and/or state power, is not reducible to them. It is sustained in part through belief, through legitimacy. Actor network theory is a very useful tool for thinking about “the fundamental a-symmetry between shapers of events and consumers of events” – an asymmetry of symbolic power that media do not so much create, as deepen, entrench, naturalise. Michel Callon and Bruno Latour were not thinking of media directly back in 1980, but that does not diminish the relevance of their insights for understanding media’s symbolic power. Latour’s analysis of networks’ relation to the territories they cover captures beautifully why the complex issues of representation raised by media are always more than “textual”.
