Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

Eric Macé

La société et son double. Une journée ordinaire de télévision

  • Eric Macé
    Paris, Armand Colin, avril 2006


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    Society and its Double: An Average Day on Television
    What would we know about our society if we had to know it only through TV programs? What could it tell us about social (race, class, gender) relations in our "real" world? The research field is an entire day of French television (Friday, 28 Jan. 2000), as broadcast by the main television networks. By approaching these programs as a "social world," I attempt to understand television's rules, norms and values as if I were an anthropologist observing an "exotic" society. It appears that this virtual social world expresses an "annoyed conservatism" which is structured by two dynamics: social inversion and the fear of social inversion. On one hand, subaltern majorities become quantitative minorities: women, lower classes and North Africans (among non-white people, which is not true in France). On the other, these minorities appear as threats, because of their deviousness, their laziness, their resentment. In a way, it is a realistic snapshot of the effects of the French Republicanism on the social imagination, caused by-in spite of actual discrimination-an abstract and universal (i.e.: gender- and color-blind) concept of equality. This book contributes to a new post-critical and anthropological approach of what we call "mediacultures"



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