New Media — Old Empires: Celebrity, Sex and Revolutions of Knowing

Abstract

The wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton was the most mediated and viewed event in human history. Eclipsing the marriage of William’s own parents in 1981, the 2011 British royal wedding was telecast, podcast, tweeted, reported and skype-cast to an estimated 2 billion people across the planet (BBC, 2011a). While other great global spectacles have attracted enormous viewing audiences, the royal wedding appears to have elicited a universal romantic and nuptial imagining. Diverse viewing communities across the world were, presumably, entranced by the grandeur and glamour of the event, and a sense of shared ritual that sanctified desire, fecundity and the promise of new life and new hope.

All desires that do not lead to pain when they remain unsatisfied are unnecessary, but the desire is easily got rid of, when the thing desired is difficult to obtain or the desires seem likely to produce harm.

Epicurus, Principal Doctrines