Visual Culture and the Virtual

The Internet and Religious Displays

Bibliographic Data

ID20040993
AuthorsKieran Flanagan (0000-0001-5394-7829, University of Bristol, corresponding author)
Year2004
Pages73-101
Publication date2004-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueSeen and Unseen (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9780230502383_4
OpenAlexW2486185690
ISBN9780230502383
LanguageEN
References cited11

Between television and the home computer, an increased amount of work and leisure activity is devoted to looking at the screen and deciphering what is seen on it. With so many visual outlets available, the contingency of postmodernity has invaded the gaze, for with so much to see there is confusion about what to see and how to see it. Sometimes, the activity of looking can be passive, but in other forms it can be interactive. Increasingly the camera lens supplies the means of being there for all who view. Visual technology seems to supply the window through which many facets of culture are to be seen. This technology also affects expectations of authentic fieldwork. No longer is it sufficient for the anthropologist to convey in text his two years in the field; a video is expected as well to supply a visual basis to what people will read later in other forms of academic communication. The enormous expansion of access to the visual, to worlds hitherto unseen, is a much-remarked miracle of technology. This ocular turn to the making of culture has been surprisingly under-researched in sociology. Visual culture, the inchoate discipline that signifies this turn, has been kept at a sociological distance. This suspicion is curious, for concerns with the implications of visual culture are to be found in the formation of the mental life of the metropolis that Simmel so well chronicled. He supplied grounds for thinking that this expansion of visual opportunity was not entirely beneficial

Aesthetics · Art · Contingency · Epistemology · Gaze · Modernity · Postmodernity · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Visual arts · Visual culture · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Media, Religion, Digital Communication · Philosophy · Psychology · Religious Tourism and Spaces

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