Week 10 Lectorial Reflection
I have never really reflected on media institutions as a concept before this lectorial, my love of the content trumping how it was made from a studio side of things. Yet having Brian use marriage, a social institution to provide context for how media institutions are seen gave a clear and concise entry point for me into this topic. A group brainstorming session on how marriage is an institution yielded responses such as
- Governed by expectations
- Values/monogamy
- Legal framework/ regulatory
- Meta-institutional frame
- Widely accepted/practice
- Cultural ‘rules’
- Rituals, symbolic
- Community recognition
- Social
- Reproduce social relations, expectations
- Historical continuities
- Superstitions
- Romantic love – cultural narratives
- Economic cultural
Having associated the term institutions with companies such as the BBC and Facebook, I never realised that the news and journalism could be considered institutions. This opened my eyes to the collaboration between institutions that have become more prevalent in today’s society. On page 152 of the Dijck & Poell reading, the mention the BBC issuing a policy report embracing digitisation, and this a prime example of how ingrained social media has become in other institutions. Television shows more often than not, nowadays, have hashtags at the bottom of the screen to invite the audience to start a conversation on a global scale, thus keeping the content in the zeitgeist for longer than its airtime. Events from natural disasters to movies are made popular by the global conversations on Twitter, ensuring social media is an institution that as become a necessity in the media landscape.
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