ABSTRACT
Real life is vastly more exciting than synthetic life, and this is real-life drama with audience participation. This idea – and the associated claim of television to present “real life” – does not disappear in the era of television “plenty”, but rather comes under increasing pressure to take new forms. Media rituals are actions that reproduce the myth that the media are our privileged access-point to social reality, but they work not through articulated beliefs but through the boundaries and category distinctions around which media rituals are organised. The “celebrification process” in Big Brother is obvious to everyone, both performers and viewers, even though far from transparent in its details and exclusions. The term “ritualisation” is our way of tracing how rituals connect to power; for media rituals, the link in question is to the increasing organisation of social life around media “centres”.
