Nick Couldry: Liveness Reality and the Mediated Habitus
- Liveness should be interpreted as a development within media history as a whole. . . . At the base, the need to connect oneself, with others, to the world’s events, is central to the development of the modern nation.
- Television’s liveness has long been seen as one of its key features. This paper argues that “liveness” is not a textual feature, but a more fundamental category (in Durkheim’s sense) that contributes to underlying conceptions of how media are involved in social organization through their provision of privileged access to central social “realities.” This ideological view of liveness (cf. Jane Feuer’s early work) is then extended in two ways: first, to consider two new forms of “liveness” that do not involve television (online liveness via the Internet and “group liveness” via the mobile phone); and second, by connecting liveness with Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, and thereby linking “liveness” (including in its extended senses) with other parts of the materialized system of classification through which we make sense of the everyday world.
- online liveness: social co-presence on a variety of scales from very small groups in chat rooms to huge international audiences for breaking news on major Web sites, all made possible by the Internet as an underlying infrastructure. Often, online liveness overlaps with the existing category of liveness, for example, Web sites linked to reality TV programs such as Big Brother which simply offer an alternative outlet for material that could in principle have been broadcast on television if there had been an audience to justify it.
- The category “liveness” helps to shape the disposition to remain “connected” in all its forms, even though (as we have seen) the types of liveness are now pulling in different directions. It might seem that, by broadening our consideration of liveness this far, we have lost the specificity that made it such a compelling term in academic writing on media and in everyday media discourse
