Media and Belief in an Interdependent World
4-5 March 2005, The American University of Paris
An international conference organised by the Department of International Communications at The American University of Paris
This small international conference will explore the relationship between media practice and various definitions of belief.
Contemporary developments in media have made us aware of how interdependent media and cultures are in our world. The Internet has made media from other cultures and languages available to us with relative ease but also has broken down the traditional systems of authorisation of news and made rumours more powerful, global and faster. These rumours have powerful effects and depend on the gullibility or incredulity of media audiences. Events are increasingly organised in order to be reported, for their media exposure. In a type of inflation of the media event, they become more and more macabre and frightening perhaps in attempt to make themselves believable.
Media globalisation may have given way to international media regionalisation. Different parts of the world now look at different media and read each other's media in different ways. The most striking example of this has been the rise of Arabic language satellite news networks which tell very different stories. Given the sudden perceived importance of media in the relations between the various civilisations, the question of belief and how and why people believe has become a central and important question for understanding the role of media in various societies
The rise of reality television provides publics with whole new ways of dealing with television, cutting the barriers between the old genres of fiction, drama, documentary and game. The circulation of reality television formats is very important indeed. American Idol has been followed by Arab Idol; Big Brother by the French Loft Story. The way the real is being represented has radically changed not only in news but also in other programming.
Corporations increasingly spend larger and larger budgets on building brand identities around aesthetic choices but also value systems. Branding is more and more a process of making believe in a possible world associated with the brand. Political parties in some countries have indulged in complex branding.
What then is happening to belief? Do audiences believe media in new ways? How does it differ according to religious or cultural background or national tradition? How does the decline of public broadcasting and the development of huge media corporations through mergers affect these questions? What are the permutations of media belief in contemporary Western society? What is the role of celebrity? How do pleasure, identity and belief mesh together?
