Page 61 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

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Circulation

Johanna Sumiala

Tracing circulation
Circulating gaze
Circulating imagination
Circulating religious associations
Circulating ethics

If we have been able to show that glorified sites like global and local were
made out of circulating entities, why not postulate that subjectivities,
justifications, unconscious, and personalities would circulate as well?
(Latour 2005: 207; original emphasis)

We live in a network society; a society in which everything is always in
circulation; items, ideas, and even social relations—without rest—liquid, as
Zygmunt Bauman (2004) calls it. The Oxford English Dictionary defines
circulation as

the transmission or passage of anything (e.g. money, news) from hand to
hand, or from person to person (with the notion of its “going the round”
of a country, etc.); dissemination or publication, whether by transmission
from one to another, or by distribution or diffusion of separate copies.

The simplest way of defining circulation is, thus, to say that it is about
“going the round” or “passing on” something (or both)—whether it is
material or immaterial items, goods, artefacts, ideas, or beliefs that are being
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distributed and disseminated. In today’s world, circulation could not be
understood without the strong role of the media. The anatomy of mediated
circulation consists of a number of encounters with different actors: new
and old media, images, texts, viewers, subjects, venues, consumers, vendors,
markets, experts, journalists, producers. In short, circulation in today’s world
is acted out in cultural and social networks shaped by the communicative
logic of the new media technology. Networks enable people to communicate
individually from one to one, but even more important, they make it possible