Core post — complexity and ritual

There's a very clear unifying thread this week about the complexity of considering television (and really, any media) studies at the global level. Each of the articles takes a slightly different tack in discussing it. Kumar's discussion includes a pedagogical framework for highlighting that complexity through a continual exploration of the paucity of any definition, which has done a great job structuring our class thus far and really does show how the paucity goes both ways, towards field and object. Curtin I think frames the complexity most simply: it's not about seeing the forest and the trees, but rather taking both into account together. And while both of those articles made their own interesting points, I was the most interested by Morley's article this week because I've spent much of the semester thinking about the ritual aspects of television.

James Carey describes it by way of example with the newspaper. "A ritual view of communication will...view reading a newspaper less as sending or gaining information and more as attending a mass, a situation in which nothing new is learned but in which a particular view of the world is portrayed and confirmed." I tend to agree with the idea not that the view is correct, but rather that it's an important aspect of our communicative practices that is often pushed aside in favor of considering almost exclusively what information is being presented and/or how the audience is reading a text. One particular set of texts that brought it to mind earlier in class was the screenings of Life with Luigi, when we were discussing the ways that the text served as instruction to viewers — in addition to the information gleaned (or not), there's a particular way that watching it means acting/becoming/being part of the community that is considering what it means to integrate. Participation comes not only through opening a line of credit, but also through the act of watching (without any valuation of that participation). Morley seems to take it into account really intelligently to me, asking how the "we-feeling" of community is continually engendered, and holding together the ways that television and similar communication technologies are able to simultaneously fragment and homogenize cultures — "the regular viewing of television news (or of a long-running soap opera) can be seen in the same light - as discourses which constitute collectivities through a sense of 'participation' and and through the production of both a simultaneity of experience and a sense of a 'past in common.'"

That sort of nuance and holding of contradiction is, to me, the most difficult and interesting part of high-quality writing because it creates space for questions and further research that promises to hold both the forest and the trees in view. Rather than speculating about homogenization in general, the question becomes for which groups is there a sense of homogenization, for which is there a sense of fragmenting, and in relation to which media and where? Of course, that kind of nuance and specificity is difficult — especially in the face of a question like, "so what?" But, frankly, I think some of the reason that arguments get overextended and don't navigate or investigate a contradiction without resolving it is because the drive to have a big, bold, "so what" gets in the way.