ABSTRACT
Media have played a fundamental role in the emergence of modernity’s institutions and the forms of coordination on which they rely. The relationship between media and the possibility of society is so basic to modernity that it is often hard to see: its operations are almost entirely naturalised, and in a specific sense mythified. The role of the printing press in the Reformation in Europe in challenging traditional forms of religious authority is well known; so too is the role of books and pamphlets in the emergence of profound challenge to the autocratic states of the UK, France and elsewhere, and in the longer-term building of modern civil society. Media are institutions with particular power over the means for representing shared reality, reality that, over time and through that power, becomes recognised as “ours”: media institutions, within modernity, came to acquire what Pierre Bourdieu, in relation to earlier religious institutions, called “the power of constructing reality”.
