Nick Couldry: Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice. London: Polity. 2012.

Abstract

“That’s the Beijing National Television Building!”, the owner of the Chinese restaurant exclaimed as he noticed the cover of a book my colleagues and I were discussing over lunch. We laughed and acknowledged his moment of recognition – noting that, whereas we had been seeing the cultural artefact to which he referred primarily as the cover photo of Nick Couldry’s book, Media, Society, World, he had seen it as a representation of home. And, to some extent, this fleeting moment of connection and difference in recognition illus- trates one of Couldry’s key points: that mediated representations are a part of larger social practices that locate us and connect us to one another. Media representations offer the potential for mutual recognition. At the same time, they do not guarantee that we see or experience the same associations because we may be situated differently in our social rela- tions. Those of us who recognize our mismatched interpretations and different situations relative to mediated representations end up puzzled as to what our mutual obligations might be in this or that social setting. What difference does it make that “representations, power over representations, and how we interact with technologies of representation” are a part of the ordering of our social world? This is the question that Couldry sets out to address in this important contri- bution, which synthesises insights from media studies and social theory. The book offers an excellent summation of current media theory, presented in a manner meant to be acces- sible for those in the broader field of sociology