The Mana of Mass Society

The Mana of Mass Society PDF Author: William Mazzarella
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022643639X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
We often invoke the “magic” of mass media to describe seductive advertising or charismatic politicians. In The Mana of Mass Society, William Mazzarella asks what happens to social theory if we take that idea seriously. How would it change our understanding of publicity, propaganda, love, and power? Mazzarella reconsiders the concept of “mana,” which served in early anthropology as a troubled bridge between “primitive” ritual and the fascination of mass media. Thinking about mana, Mazzarella shows, means rethinking some of our most fundamental questions: What powers authority? What in us responds to it? Is the mana that animates an Aboriginal ritual the same as the mana that energizes a revolutionary crowd, a consumer public, or an art encounter? At the intersection of anthropology and critical theory, The Mana of Mass Society brings recent conversations around affect, sovereignty, and emergence into creative contact with classic debates on religion, charisma, ideology, and aesthetics.

The Mana of Mass Society

The Mana of Mass Society PDF Author: William Mazzarella
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022643639X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Get Book Here

Book Description
We often invoke the “magic” of mass media to describe seductive advertising or charismatic politicians. In The Mana of Mass Society, William Mazzarella asks what happens to social theory if we take that idea seriously. How would it change our understanding of publicity, propaganda, love, and power? Mazzarella reconsiders the concept of “mana,” which served in early anthropology as a troubled bridge between “primitive” ritual and the fascination of mass media. Thinking about mana, Mazzarella shows, means rethinking some of our most fundamental questions: What powers authority? What in us responds to it? Is the mana that animates an Aboriginal ritual the same as the mana that energizes a revolutionary crowd, a consumer public, or an art encounter? At the intersection of anthropology and critical theory, The Mana of Mass Society brings recent conversations around affect, sovereignty, and emergence into creative contact with classic debates on religion, charisma, ideology, and aesthetics.

Mass Society

Mass Society PDF Author: Salvador Giner
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 1483261182
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Mass Society deals with the total outlook of human including modern politics culture, social inequality, community life, and problems. The book reviews the history of democracy and discontent. The text analyzes the mob rule, the disenchantment of progress, and the history of democracy. Modern sociological theory explains the opposition of two extreme societal models to describe the historical dynamics of mankind. The book is an attempt to explain that a mass society outlook exists and has some inner coherence and distinctive quality. The author argues that such outlook or theory is a prominent feature in the cultural imagination of man, and that modern secular society cannot be understood without such theory. The author then proceeds to identify majority with mass, and the identification of human with mass human. This identification will lead to a community vision, though the author argues the growth of a mass interpretation of society has a negative effect on the liberal theory of the individual. The text can be interesting for political science majors, sociologists, psychologists, and economists.

The Politics of Mass Digitization

The Politics of Mass Digitization PDF Author: Nanna Bonde Thylstrup
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026203901X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
A new examination of mass digitization as an emerging sociopolitical and sociotechnical phenomenon that alters the politics of cultural memory. Today, all of us with internet connections can access millions of digitized cultural artifacts from the comfort of our desks. Institutions and individuals add thousands of new cultural works to the digital sphere every day, creating new central nexuses of knowledge. How does this affect us politically and culturally? In this book, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup approaches mass digitization as an emerging sociopolitical and sociotechnical phenomenon, offering a new understanding of a defining concept of our time. Arguing that digitization has become a global cultural political project, Thylstrup draws on case studies of different forms of mass digitization—including Google Books, Europeana, and the shadow libraries Monoskop, lib.ru, and Ubuweb—to suggest a different approach to the study of digital cultural memory archives. She constructs a new theoretical framework for understanding mass digitization that focuses on notions of assemblage, infrastructure, and infrapolitics. Mass digitization does not consist merely of neutral technical processes, Thylstrup argues, but of distinct subpolitical processes that give rise to new kinds of archives and new ways of interacting with the artifacts they contain. With this book, she offers important and timely guidance on how mass digitization alters the politics of cultural memory to impact our relationship with the past and with one another.

Culture, Society and the Media

Culture, Society and the Media PDF Author: Tony Bennett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134972121
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
This book discusses two related themes concerning the role and processes of mass communication in society. The first deals with questions regarding the power of the media: how should it be defined? how is it wielded and by whom? are previous approaches and answers to such questions adequate? The second theme revolves around the divisions between the liberal pluralist and Marxist approaches to the analysis of the nature of the media. These divisions have, in recent years, been fundamental to the debate concerning the understanding of the role of mass communication, and the examination of them in this book will challenge the reader to look more closely at a number of assumptions that have long been taken for granted.

Small Town in Mass Society

Small Town in Mass Society PDF Author: Arthur J. Vidich
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Country life
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description


The Time of the Tribes

The Time of the Tribes PDF Author: Michel Maffesoli
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780803984745
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
In this exciting book Michel Maffesoli argues that the conventional approaches to understanding solidarity and society are deeply flawed. He contends that mass culture has disintegrated and that today social existence is conducted through fragmented tribal groupings, organized around the catchwords, brand-names and sound-bites of consumer culture. The book provides a rich backcloth against which to consider the rise of `identity politics' and the `proliferation of lifestyle cultures'.

Mass Politics In The People's Republic

Mass Politics In The People's Republic PDF Author: Alan P.L. Liu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429719353
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Exploring the crucial link between state and society in the People's Republic of China (PRC), this book analyzes the interaction between the Chinese Communist Party and the country's major social groups. It explores how public opinion contributes to a mass political culture in China.

Why Democracies Flounder and Fail

Why Democracies Flounder and Fail PDF Author: Michael Haas
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319740709
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 526

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Book Description
Democracy is in crisis because voices of the people are ignored due to a politics of mass society. After demonstrating how the French Fourth Republic failed, wherein Singapore’s totalitarianism is a dangerous model, Washington is enmeshed in gridlock, and there is a global democracy deficit, solutions are offered to revitalize democracy as the best form of government. The book demonstrates how mass society politics operates, with intermediate institutions of civil society (media, pressure groups, political parties) no longer transmitting the will of the people to government but instead are concerned with corporate interests and have developed oligarchical mindsets. Rather than micro-remedy bandaids, the author focuses on the need to transform governing philosophies from pragmatic to humanistic solutions.

Stateville

Stateville PDF Author: James B. Jacobs
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022621883X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Stateville penitentiary in Illinois has housed some of Chicago's most infamous criminals and was proclaimed to be "the world's toughest prison" by Joseph Ragen, Stateville's powerful warden from 1936 to 1961. It shares with Attica, San Quentin, and Jackson the notoriety of being one of the maximum security prisons that has shaped the public's conception of imprisonment. In Stateville James B. Jacobs, a sociologist and legal scholar, presents the first historical examination of a total prison organization—administrators, guards, prisoners, and special interest groups. Jacobs applies Edward Shils's interpretation of the dynamics of mass society in order to explain the dramatic events of the past quarter century that have permanently altered Stateville's structure. With the extension of civil rights to previously marginal groups such as racial minorities, the poor, and, ultimately, the incarcerated, prisons have moved from society's periphery toward its center. Accordingly Stateville's control mechanisms became less authoritarian and more legalistic and bureaucratic. As prisoners' rights increased, the preogatives of the staff were sharply curtailed. By the early 1970s the administration proved incapable of dealing with politicized gangs, proliferating interest groups, unionized guards, and interventionist courts. In addition to extensive archival research, Jacobs spent many months freely interacting with the prisoners, guards, and administrators at Stateville. His lucid presentation of Stateville's troubled history will provide fascinating reading for a wide audience of concerned readers. ". . . [an] impressive study of a complex social system."—Isidore Silver, Library Journal

The Third Way

The Third Way PDF Author: Anthony Giddens
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745666604
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
The idea of finding a 'third way' in politics has been widely discussed over recent months - not only in the UK, but in the US, Continental Europe and Latin America. But what is the third way? Supporters of the notion haven't been able to agree, and critics deny the possibility altogether. Anthony Giddens shows that developing a third way is not only a possibility but a necessity in modern politics.