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Visual Culture and the Virtual: The Internet and Religious Displays

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Seen and Unseen

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Abstract

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.

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Notes and References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bristol, UK

    Kieran Flanagan (Reader in Sociology)

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© 2004 Kieran Flanagan

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Flanagan, K. (2004). Visual Culture and the Virtual: The Internet and Religious Displays. In: Seen and Unseen. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230502383_4

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