Columbia International Affairs Online: Working Papers

CIAO DATE: 08/2009

"The Media": A Crisis of Appearance

Nick Couldry

May 2009

Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University

Abstract

‘Inaugural’ – as often, a word’s origins remind us of something we forget. The word denotes a beginning of course, but also the taking of ‘auguries’ at the start of an uncertain journey. The classical Mediterranean had various ways of taking omens or auguries (not all cruel) including the ancient method of reading the movement of birds of prey in the sky: in both Greek and Latin the words for omen and bird of prey are the same. I claim no special knowledge of the future, but the image of auguries remains apt because it registers the great uncertainty that these days attends any talk of media, both in the media industries and in media research. The signs of ‘media culture’ are increasingly difficult to read. It’s those difficulties on which I want to reflect tonight. If there’s one question that has interested me as long as I’ve been thinking about media, it’s this: what are the roots of media institutions’ social authority and power? Yes, media are in a sense ‘just there’. But the particular media we have, the particular authority they have, is always the result of a historical process. Radio and TV in the UK, as Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff showed, took a long time to find an appropriate voice for ‘speaking to and for’ the nation, but a broader process of embedding media outputs in everyday life here and in other countries was already under way: in the 1920s the sociologist Gabriel Tarde saw the reinforcements between media stories and everyday contexts as an unstoppable force of social connection. Over time, media institutions became what Michel Callon and Bruno Latour call ‘obligatory passing-points’ in daily life. But the banality, now, of our everyday relationship to media allows us to forget both its historical contingency and its basis in a distinctive form of power.