Comments on: Celebrity Journalists and North Korean Prisoners

By: Kerim

Kerim — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 09:39:19 +0000

You might want to see this OTM story about how major news outlets keep stories about their own reporters getting kidnapped secret, but don’t do the same thing for stringers:

http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/07/10/03

By: Kate G.

Kate G. — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:02:26 +0000

You write: “The play between institutional and individual cultural capital can be understood through the structure-agency dualism within the anthropological tool of practice theory. However, practice theory usually works within calculations of oppositionality and tensions. In the classic view, individuals, particularly activists, are in an antagonistic relationship with media institutions” and “With practice theory, we often conclude that agency is structured and the higher the agent gets within spirals of power the more structuration occurs.”
I don’t see how you get there. Where is the inherent oppositionality and where does practice theory say that agency is increasingly structured? It seems like you’ve undercut what practice theory was trying to do. Perhaps this works if you’re defining this as Foucault and later Bourdieu, but it does depict Outline of a Theory of Practice and it certainly doesn’t work for Giddens (structuration). So I guess you’re using some other concept of structuration? It’s all just structural power and individuals do … what, I can’t see how they are anything other than puppets of spirals of power who take themselves there THINKING they’re active agents but in fact just reproducing the structures of power. What a dismal view of the world.
Here are some points I would ask you to keep in mind:
There’s more than one structure, arising from a genealogies or prior texts of previous structures. They also operate in different contexts, levels, and are based in different ranges of resources. These structures also intersect in different ways, depending on historical conditions, the individuals involved, etc., which potentially shifts the ‘spiral’ in a different direction.
I think this is probably sort of inherent in the fact that you’re analyzing a structure of media power in terms of two sisters and their connections, but it didn’t read that way. So, more on this, please!

By: MTBradley

MTBradley — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:33:58 +0000

Not so much on topic, but last week All Things Considered carried a story about a National Endowment for Democracy-funded South Korea-based biweekly that rather amazingly did not question the ethics of surreptitiously filming individuals living under the thumb of a Stalinist government and then putting the footage into public circulation.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105807899#commentBlock

By: ckelty

ckelty — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:06:44 +0000

does that make it a white elephant in the room or are you applying the one drop of blood rule here? 🙂

By: med anthro

med anthro — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:37:44 +0000

When talking about institutional and cultural capital, you omit the fact that both Ling(s) and Lee are married to white males. They form part and parcel of the new technological brahmin caste in the 21st century West.

It’s the elephant in the room no one wants to talk about.