An Ethnography of Media Rituals in the Netherlands
This project focuses on media rituals, instances when ‘ordinary people’ come into contact literally and figuratively with people or places from the media. This project is the first to present wide-ranging, ethnographical research aiming to investigate the functions and mechanisms of media rituals ‘in action’
From meet-and-greets, signing session and official fan days to commercial or individual tours around film studios or celebrity neighbourhoods. Scholarly literature presumes that such events are growing in popularity and offer an interesting insight into the role that media culture plays in everyday life and as a consequence offer an important insight into the role that media culture plays in everyday life. Empirical research into this, however, is scarce. While the relevance of the concept of media ritual for media research has been widely acknowledged, the existent, sporadic Anglo-Saxon examples have mainly served as illustrations
The material dimensions of media culture
This project is the first to present wide-ranging, ethnographical research aiming to investigate the functions and mechanisms of media rituals ‘in action’. With a careful and systematic study of the phenomenology of media rituals in the Netherlands, this research project offers an innovative perspective on the role and the meaning of present-day media culture. The project goes beyond the dominant paradigm of post-structuralism by paying attention to the material, physical dimensions of media culture.
This research highlights how unmediated and physical encounters affect the construction, perception and experiencing of media culture. Furthermore, by employing coherent lines of inquiries and cases selected from a historically informed corpus, and by combining anthropological and media research perspectives, the project aims to rethink, refine and improve the possible shortcomings of the concept of media ritual, and to open up new avenues towards an empirically-grounded theory.
The project is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).
