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216 Critical Theories of Mass Media
3 For example see ‘TV time and catastrophe, or beyond the pleasure
principle of television’ in Mellencamp (1990).
4 For a detailed analysis of this merging of economic and cultural
realms see Marshall Berman’s All That is Solid Melts into Air: The
Experience of Modernity (1983).
5 Meek provides the following interesting interpretations of the
phenomenon of mass television mourning:

Community would henceforth be symbolised through the cin-
ematic spectacle of the return of the dead. In a parody of what
Bataille and his colleagues saw as the principle of expenditure
in the ancient festivals, film becomes the primary mediator with
the spirit world. With television, mourning becomes electronic
at new global levels.
(Meek 1998: n.p.)

The crowd of the unmourned who have always threatened to
play havoc in the world of the living and were therefore given
free reign at predetermined, culturally sanctioned periods of
archaic festival, now co-exist in the purgatorial present of
television.
(Meek 1998: n.p.)

Chapter 2

1 Disenchantment is a concept originally developed by the German
sociologist Max Weber and refers to the manner in which as
modernity progresses more and more of our lives become
dominated by systemic structures that promote various forms of
rationality but which leave less and less room for more tradition-
ally spontaneous cultural forms and their qualities of ambiguity
and unpredictability (a theme explored in Part 2’s detailed
account of contemporary media trends). The ‘disenchantment of
the world’ is a phrase that Weber uses in The Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism ([1930] 2001) to describe the cultural
effects of rapid modernization with its new technologies and
bureaucratic structures.
2 Kracauer’s description owes something to Simmel’s concepts of
neurasthenia, Chokerlebnis and new blasé mental attitudes that urban
dwellers need to adopt as a survival strategy with which to deal
with the qualitatively new social conditions created by mass living.
3 See Harris and Taylor (2005, ch.4) for a full discussion of
photography’s role within a wider commodity culture.

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