Ordinary People and the Media
The Demotic Turn
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10497191 |
|---|---|
| Authors | A West (0000-0003-2401-3335), Amy E West (0000-0003-2933-8366, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 53 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 82-85 |
| Publication date | 2012-02-28 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Screen (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0036-9543 • E-ISSN: 1460-2474 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/screen/hjr060 |
| OpenAlex | W2157054702 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
In Ordinary People and the Media: the Demotic Turn Graeme Turner calls for a critical reappraisal of contemporary thinking in relation to popular media forms and the increased visibility of ordinary people in the domains of media production, reception and celebrity. His use of the term ‘demotic’ is instructive, and deliberate. The demotic, defined on the opening page as meaning ‘of or for the common people’, is missing something: here we have the demos (= people) without the kratos (= rule, strength, power) offered by constructions of the democratic. Turner insists upon a distinction between the two ideas, arguing that optimistic critiques of contemporary transformations in media culture have been too quick to assume that increased participation in media production will correlate with increased power and control. Indeed, in a number of examples identified by Turner, and discussed below, the inverse may be true. Thus the key term in Turner's thesis is tinged with a sense of loss, or at least disappointment. On the other hand, the ‘demotic turn’ carries a more positive inflection, proffering, as Turner states, ‘an alternative, less pejorative and more productive, way of understanding some of the shifts in content and participation often noticed in critiques of the tabloid’ (p. 6). In this way, the ‘demotic turn’ is both provocative or contentious as a phrase and deliberately neutral, offering a ‘clean slate’ for ongoing debates regarding transformations in contemporary media culture
Aesthetics · Art · Disappointment · Media studies · Pejorative · Political science · Power (physics · Sociology · Gender, Feminism, and Media · History · Law · Media Studies and Communication · Psychology · Social Psychology · South Asian Cinema and Culture
| Citations per year | 0.33 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2014 - 2022 (9) |
| Highly cited | No |