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Towards a historical understanding of the media event
Abstract
The English-language research tradition of studying media events is widely considered to have started with Dayan and Katz’ Media Events. This seminal work is characterised by an emphasis on liveness and broadcast technology as conditions of eventfulness. The German-language tradition of research on historical media events provides a very different approach to studying media events, starting from the 16th-century advent of mechanical production and distribution. Bringing together these strands of research, the article argues for a deepening of the historical dimension in conceiving of media events. After a critical review of the English-language tradition and an overview of key media-historical research contributions particularly from Germany, it discusses three main themes: the role of temporal acceleration over time by means of media technologies; the role of premeditation in events and the tradition of discussing media-generated events as ‘pseudo-events’, and the historically shifting relationships between mediated and non-mediated communication in the event. By way of conclusion, the article relates a historical perspective on media events to recent research and discussion around mediatisation.
... In der Forschung zu Medienereignissen lassen sich zwei Traditionen unterscheiden: zum einen die internationale Forschung, die stark durch die Arbeit von Dayan und Katz (1992) beeinflusst ist; zum anderen eine insbesondere durch deutsche Forschung inspirierte historische Medienereignisforschung (Ytreberg 2017). Beide Traditionen haben gemeinsam, dass sie Medienereignisse durch ein sehr großes, nahezu allumfassendes Publikum sowie durch eine außergewöhnlich starke Medienpräsenz definieren (Bösch 2010;Couldry 2003, 61-64;Dekavalla 2012;Hepp & Couldry 2010;Morgner 2016;Rothenbuhler 2001;Scannell 1995Scannell , 2014. ...
... Letzteres ist bei Dayan und Katz fast ausschließlich auf die Live-Berichterstattung des Fernsehens bezogen, die als Unterbrechung des Alltäglichen nahezu alle Fernsehsender umfasse und mit einer loyalen, werbenden Darstellungsweise verbunden sei (Dayan & Katz 1992, 78-92). Die nachfolgende internationale Forschung wie auch die historische Tradition haben sich von dieser engen Bestimmung gelöst und verstehen die außergewöhnlich starke Medienpräsenz stattdessen als eine medienübergreifende Thematisierung des Medienereignisses (Darstellung und Vermittlung durch verschiedenste Medientitel, -formate und -techniken, zumeist mehrtätige sowie internationale Berichterstattung, Bösch 2008; Hepp & Couldry 2010;Örnebring 2004;Schlott 2013;Sonnevend 2018;Ytreberg 2017). In der historischen Medienereignisforschung wird dabei die Selbstreferenzialität der Medien betont (Bösch 2010;Schlott 2013, 16f ), denn Medien berichten darüber, wie andere Medien das Ereignis darstellen (z.B. ein Pressebericht mit Informationen zur bevorstehenden Fernsehübertragung). Wenige AutorInnen konzipieren Medienereignisse als medienvermitteltes Netzwerk kollektiver Reaktionen: Demnach berichten Me-dien über die Reaktionen bestimmter Gruppen und Gemeinschaften, was weitere Reaktionen auslöst und damit die enorme Reichweite und außergewöhnliche Bedeutung von Medienereignissen erzeugt (Dietze 2008;Morgner 2016). ...
... Eine gemeinsame Annahme ist zum Teil auch, dass Medienereignisse vom Medienpublikum in weitgehend homogener und stark emotionaler Weise wahrgenommen werden (Bösch 2008(Bösch , 2010Dayan & Katz 1992;Real 2001;Rothenbuhler 2001) -was allerdings zunehmend infrage gestellt wird (Couldry 2003;Dekavalla 2012;Hepp & Couldry 2010;Örnebring 2004;Scannell 1995;Sonnevend 2018). Beide Traditionen betonen die Bedeutung von Narrativen (Bösch 2010;Dayan & Katz 1992;Ytreberg 2017). Dayan und Katz (1992, 31) unterscheiden analytisch zwischen drei grundlegenden Narrativen: 1) Contests (regelgeleitete Wettbewerbe mit Hervorbringung von SiegerInnen und VerliererInnen, z.B. die Olympischen Spiele), 2) Conquests (HeldInnentaten, die bisherige Grenzen überwinden und einen Umbruch markieren, z.B. die Mondlandung) und 3) Coronations ("rites of passage" großer Persönlichkeiten, die gesellschaftliche Werte symbolisieren, z.B. die royale Hochzeit von Charles und Diana). ...
Jene Ereignisse, die als „Medienereignisse“ in das kollektive Gedächtnis eingehen, werden gemeinhin an einem außergewöhnlich großen Medienpublikum festgemacht („huge audience – the whole world watching“, Katz & Liebes 2007, 158). Trotz dieser konzeptionellen Bedeutung der Größe des Medienpublikums gibt es hierzu bislang kaum Forschung. In einer kritischen Zusammenfassung des Forschungsstands zeigt dieser Beitrag zunächst, dass WissenschaftlerInnen ihre Informationen zum Milliardenpublikum globaler Medienereignisse insbesondere aus den Medien selbst beziehen – und auch RezipientInnen durch diese Berichterstattung beeinflusst werden. Damit gewinnt die Frage an Bedeutung, wie und auf welcher Basis journalistische Medien über das globale Publikum berichten. Mittels einer qualitativen Inhaltsanalyse der britischen Berichterstattung über die Trauerfeier für Lady Diana wird exemplarisch gezeigt, dass Medienberichte die Quantität und Qualität des globalen Zuschauerverhaltens bereits im Vorfeld des Medienereignisses definieren und diese Spekulationen allenfalls auf interessengeleitete Aussagen stützen. Daraus folgen konzeptionelle Überlegungen zu Medienereignissen und Anregungen für künftige Studien.
... For that reason, networked media technologies undermine the media events' capacity for the homogenisation of time. Yet the temporal scatter should not mislead us into considering shared temporality in networked media as being impossible (Seeck and Rantanen, 2015;Ytreberg, 2017). As Frosh and Pinchevski (2018: 137) state, the temporal characteristics of media events shift 'from a heightened presence of shared immediacy to a thickened present of potentiality'. ...
... In Butler's (1988: 520) account, performativity refers to the 'stylized repetition of acts through time' and underpins the idea of contingency rather than stable and fixed sets of meanings. Viewing through this lens, ritualised media events are constructed through the narratives of the events themselves (Ytreberg, 2017). Moreover, they are always open to being framed by alternative narratives that by no means reach a final closure of signification (Hall, 1996). ...
... For that reason, networked media technologies undermine the media events' capacity for the homogenisation of time. Yet the temporal scatter should not mislead us into considering shared temporality in networked media as being impossible (Seeck and Rantanen, 2015;Ytreberg, 2017). As Frosh and Pinchevski (2018: 137) state, the temporal characteristics of media events shift 'from a heightened presence of shared immediacy to a thickened present of potentiality'. ...
... In Butler's (1988: 520) account, performativity refers to the 'stylized repetition of acts through time' and underpins the idea of contingency rather than stable and fixed sets of meanings. Viewing through this lens, ritualised media events are constructed through the narratives of the events themselves (Ytreberg, 2017). Moreover, they are always open to being framed by alternative narratives that by no means reach a final closure of signification (Hall, 1996). ...
This article calls for a rethinking of the formation of affective publics as a ritual process. Given the particularities of networked media, I suggest that media rituals extend into the formation of affective publics celebrating imagined collectivities in a fashion of collaborative storytelling. This is a transitional process in which a collectivity is validated, affirmed and reinforced through ritual actions. To illustrate this dynamic, I suggest drawing upon three key concepts (namely temporality, performativity and liminality), which are derivatives of media rituals theory, but also shed light on the dynamics of affective publics. To specify, first, ritual temporality refers to ambient concentrations that create a breach in the ordinary flow of media texts. Second, performativity implicates the affect-driven rhythms of digital storytelling feeding algorithmic curations that form an embodied harmony between participants and a sense of collectivity. Third, liminality entails ambiguous situations that enable the formation of affective publics by means of voluntary commitment, anonymity and the uniformity of participants. These concepts are the key entry points in capturing the ritual aspects of affective publics. Viewed through this lens, scrutiny for the ritual dynamics of networked publics helps us to grasp the affective formations of networked media.
... As notícias, por via da mediação massmediática, construíam a realidade social através da mediação da experiência. Uma mediação que nos levava até às experiências que não vivíamos na primeira pessoa, fossem elas desportivas, políticas, culturais, económicas ou de conflitos, catástrofes ou momentos de júbilo de uma dada comunidade (Ytreberg, 2017). ...
... Embora existam eventos mediáticos que, como sabemos, durante um dado período fixam a atenção e o agendamento noticioso, a dinâmica que aqui se caracteriza não se confunde com a do evento mediático, tal como é normalmente concebido (Ytreberg, 2009(Ytreberg, , 2017Dayan e Katz, 1992;Couldry e Hepp, 2018). ...
Este é um livro dedicado à interpretação e descodificação do que é a comunicação da comunicação. De como a nossa forma de comunicar está a moldar as nossas instituições, como a mediação moldou a nossa comunicação e a rede transformou a comunicação de massas numa comunicação em rede e a cultura de massas numa cultura mediatizada. Criando, nesse processo, um novo sistema dos media e um novo paradigma comunicacional.
Este é um livro sobre a necessidade de uma sociologia da mediação algorítmica que explique porque é que numa cultura mediatizada, gerada por uma comunicação em rede, as pessoas são a mensagem e porque o seu traço mais distintivo reside na comunicação da comunicação.
... Balbi, 2011;Dubied, 2004;Ludes, 1991;Lundby, 2009). Among the recent critique in regard to the concept, Deacon and Stanyer (2014) mention the lack of historical approaches to mediatization; however, the latter has begun to be satisfied by several studies (Ytreberg, 2017;Marszolek and Robel, 2016;Niemeyer, 2011). As a special agent of mediatization, the front page offers the possibility of 'freezing' -at least symbolically -the very often long-lasting live coverage of the (ongoing) events. ...
... This article aimed to offer an insight into one aspect of the mediatization of the Charlie Hebdo event, namely the performative and informative character of newspaper front pages that play a significant role in the temporal processes of events that take shape and help to 'make sense' for an audience while still being 'ongoing'. Diachronically speaking, keeping trace of media texts -and specifically front pages -as a future historical source can enrich current and future scholarly work on media events and mediatization with a focus on historical and mnemonic interrogations (Ytreberg, 2017). In addition to content analysis and the analysis of media texts in general, methodologies such as news agencies ethnographies or in-depth interviews with journalists are also needed to tackle more profoundly the different editorial choices internationally when it comes to the front page. ...
This article argues that the front page plays an important temporal and explicative role for audiences, especially when it comes to journalistic work during a disruptive media event such as the Charlie Hebdo attacks. As a special agent of mediatization, the front page offers the possibility of ‘freezing’ the very often long-lasting live coverage of the (ongoing) happenings. It does not stand in opposition to faster communication of news but the front page is a very special journalistic form that opens interesting ways to contemplate news temporalities on another level. Based on a thematic content analysis of 1017 international front pages, this article develops their typology in order to analyze how the event was covered globally and locally, all by pointing out the different journalistic forms that are utilized. The study shows that the type of front page that is emerging allows us to grasp the coexistence of shared visual and textual regimes without leading to a false idea of a totalizing uniformity of information and thus of future social memories.
... Therefore, theories tracing the historical evolution of media and communication history perspectives or generational studies (Balbi & Magaudda, 2018;Bolin, 2016;Mizukoshi, 1998;Rantanen, 2005;Ytreberg, 2017) are not considered and neither are media philosophical debates (Hartmann, 2017). ...
This paper explores how the internet changes the way we deal with and plan time in Germany and China. It looks at culture and media theories of temporal change from Germany and China, differentiates these according to micro, meso, and macro levels and integrates them in a micro-meso-macro-model. We consider network, connectivity, acceleration, and mediatization theories, and place particular emphasis on the effects of social media, online journalism, and algorithmic intermediaries. We then inquire in which ways the sub dimensions of the nine-dimensional construct 'temporal understanding' change through internet-mediated communication. Findings suggest a temporal homogenization in both countries laid out as Meta trends: The focus on the 'future' is reduced, 'present' focus increases and the 'past' fluctuates paradoxically between decrease and increase. Moreover, 'fatalism' and the 'pace of life' increase and with it 'interacting experience (polychronicity)' and 'future as trust-based interaction', with the last sub-dimension only increasing in China. 'Instrumental experience (monochronicity)' and the 'future as planned expectation' decrease. These Meta trends encompass inconsistencies and paradoxical notion and move past binary classifications.
... The "Day of Fire" as a media event From the transformation of the theoretical framework of the concept of "media event", which we approach here from the English-language research tradition (Ytreberg, 2017), we frame the "Day of Fire" as both a socioenvironmental event and a media event. On the one hand, it is a pre-planned event by actors external to the media, who covered and broadcasted it widely, interrupting their media routine (Dayan & Katz, 1992); on the other hand, it is not a celebratory event, which, within a Durkheimian perspective, is presented as a driver of social integration, as the authors of the seminal book on the subject -Media Events: The Live ...
This article analyzes how the event reported by the media as the “Day of Fire”, as it becomes a media event, in a context of deep mediatization, is discussed by Jair Bolsonaro in his official Twitter account. It is understood that the discussion of this media event is part of a dispute of symbolic and persuasive power, transcending the media vehicles and conflicting with other sources of information, lived experiences, and interests of specific social groups, influencing the construction of a mobilizing narrative, which guides Bolsonaro's discursive practice in the public opinion dispute. To this end, a thematic content analysis was applied to publications gathered from the account @jairbolsonaro between July 4th and September 16th, 2019. Next, two different discourse archetypes were constructed – one using elements of risk communication and the other using elements of populist communication – in order to understand and identify the characteristics and patterns of proximity among the tweets. Based on these two communication models and the political-social context surrounding this media event, we use Critical Discourse Analysis to interpret how Bolsonaro’s discourse relates to the Brazilian socioenvironmental crisis here remarked. At last, we arrived at the conclusion that the discourse mediated through Bolsonaro's Twitter focuses on four main aspects: 1) it is reactive to the transformation of the socioenvironmental event “Day of Fire” into a media event; 2) it employs, as a strategy for the resumption of the public debate, a populist construction of two antagonistic political camps; 3) it seeks the silencing of non-capitalist ways of relating to the environment; and 4) it reveals a neoliberal populist discourse, which neglects a communication aimed at the prevention and mitigation of the existing risk.
... It is worth mentioning that historians who have not accepted Dayan and Katz's claim, as if television is the main generator of media events, argued that human culture has been creating media events for 300 years: "seen from the historical point of view, the concept of 'media events' as defined by Dayan and Katz cannot be applied, since it cannot account for the fact that already, in earlier times, certain events attracted an enormous amount of public attention" (Wilke, 2009, p. 45). Ytreberg (2017) argued that "the German-language tradition of research on historical media events provides a very different approach to studying media events [compared to English-language one], starting from the 16t h century advent of mechanical production and distribution" (p. 309). ...
This study argues that, historically, televised media events managed to become prominent in the public agenda, not only through their live broadcast on television, but also through their long-term, continuous visibility in the print media. This, both on the level of the intensity of their press coverage; and also on the level of their framing as important and significant events for society. In other words, media events have enabled a content-based “coexistence” between print media and television. Through a thematic-qualitative analysis, the study describes how two Israeli, popular and elite newspapers promoted the public discourse on two of the most famous media events in Israel’s history: the 1979 and 1999 Eurovision Song Contests in Jerusalem. Findings reveal an intensive print media coverage of the two shows, from both “soft” (gossip) and “hard” (politics) perspectives. In addition, differences were found in the historical coverage of the contests in popular newspapers, compared to elite ones.
... As an efficient mediator for social subsystems to influence media content, would pseudo-events be tonally different compared with genuine events? Ytreberg (2017) claimed that "[pseudo-events were] manufactured specifically to provide the semblance of [reality], in a way that was reportable by news writers and provided a photo opportunity so that the media's hunger for images was catered to" (p. 316). ...
Using automated content analysis, this research explores the phenomenon of pseudo-events coverage in The New York Times (N = 70,370 articles) from 1980 to 2019. By clarifying the operationalization of pseudo-events, this study introduces pseudo-events as a valuable tool to index how different social subsystems perpetuate media- tization (which is when institutions absorb and abide by media logic). Machine-learning classifiers were con- structed to measure pseudo-events, which provides historicity, specificity, and measurability — three tasks set forth for new mediatization research. We found a significant increase in pseudo-event coverage, expressing a more positive tone than genuine event coverage. Moreover, political pseudo-event coverage shows quadrennial cycles with peaks in each presidential election year. Our findings reveal the expansion of mediatization since 1980 and show how media logic has been internalized in different ways by the social subsystems of politics, culture, and economics. Institutions and their social actors need efficient tools to abide by media logic in seeking publicity and commanding authority, and pseudo-events have matured into one of the most dominant tools, especially for political actors. This study offers an innovative approach to capture complex phenomena and shows promises of broader application of machine learning to empirically quantify and identify patterns using theoretical concepts.
... As an efficient mediator for social subsystems to influence media content, would pseudo-events be tonally different compared with genuine events? Ytreberg (2017) claimed that "[pseudo-events were] manufactured specifically to provide the semblance of [reality], in a way that was reportable by news writers and provided a photo opportunity so that the media's hunger for images was catered to" (p. 316). ...
... Experienced as a "time out" or "rupture of time", the event may enforce a revitalisation of the viewer outside of the temporality of the routinely scheduled, provide "a moment of release from 'the numbness imposed upon our senses'" (McLuhan, as cited in van Loon, 2010: 111). In van Loon's thinking, the outstanding "event-temporality" (Frosh & Pinchevski, 2018) thus includes a transformative potential (a point also made by Dayan & Katz, 1992: Ch. 6; see also Sonnevend, 2018;Ytreberg, 2017). van Loon's (2010) reflections on the event and the defamiliarisation of time as time-out apply to media events in general and also echo Katz and Dayan's (2018: 147) more recent thinking about media events as having a "'time-out' character". ...
This article discusses media events and liveness as ways live is performed in and by the media. Understanding the workings of contemporary media events entails understanding how they are embedded in complex patterns of temporalities; hence, the article deploys the notion of temporality of liveness to contemplate different ways in which time is entangled and made salient as particular forms of temporality in the unfolding of media events. Analysing the Danish queen's 2020 New Year's speech, the Danish prime minister's Covid-19 speech of 11 March 2020, and the broadcasting of the inauguration of Joe Biden on 20 January 2021, the article shows that liveness can be approached analytically. The analysis unfolds the diversity and changeability of temporalities of liveness, and argues that contemporary ceremonial events may be local or global, small or large, but still reach a substantial portion of a population. Thus, a point in the article is to call attention to the enduring importance of broadcast media and television for the creation of media events that gather and “enthrall” large audiences, to quote Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, even in a time of global digital network communication.
... Subsequent revisions have reconsidered media events as potentially either disruptive and sites of planned/unplanned protests (e.g. Couldry, Hepp, & Krotz, 2010;Spracklen & Lamond, 2016), or the domain of the more mundane, commercial and everyday workings of popular culture reproduced through traditional, digital and social media (Fox, 2016;Frosh & Pinchevski, 2017;Mitu & Poulakidakos, 2016;Ytreberg, 2017). Indeed, the overtly mediatised nature of most contemporary events means that often they are re-conceptualised and re-packaged as a set of mediated experiences for attendees via collective and individualistic forms of connectivity, co-creation and personalisation (Andrews & Ritzer, 2018;Hudson & Hudson, 2013;Hutchins, 2016;Koivisto & Mattila, 2020). ...
Formula One offers an interesting terrain to explore the gendered tensions that play out in a mega event/motorsport space. Indeed, despite some recent progressive transformations, Formula One’s long-standing intertwining of ‘glamour’ and hi-tech racing has arguably reflected and projected a set of ‘traditional’ gendered dynamics seemingly more aligned with stereotypical 1960s James Bond filmic gender representations, rather than a contemporary mega sporting event.
Formula One focuses on, emphasises and embellishes masculine attributes, with these ‘macho racers’ understood and reified through their bravado, technical mastery and risk-taking endeavours. Nevertheless, the ‘real’ presence of risk, bravado or mastery is debatable in contemporary times, with Formula One the safest it has ever been. Originating in 1950, Formula One’s too frequent driver fatalities ushered in a raft of safety features since the mid-1960s that have been incrementally updated over time. Thus, while the spectre of death may loom due to wheel-to-wheel racing at speeds in excess of 200mph, the reality is a safe and largely sanitised sport, with only four fatalities occurring since 1982.
Similarly, elements of driver skill, mastery and risk-taking have also been reduced. Due to the current regulations and restrictions, drivers often conserve their cars, tyres, engines and fuel-usage rather than ‘race’ one another during a Grand Prix. As such, five-time world champion Lewis Hamilton has bemoaned the lack of effort, risk or fear for drivers and asserts that contemporary Formula One has become ‘too easy’. Further encroaching into Formula One’s space is the appeal of Esports and sim-racing which, through its rapid progression, development and commercialisation, is offering an alternative ‘virtual’ motorsport avenue replete with championships and ratification by official organisations. Hence, the once sacred space for displays of masculine bravado, mastery and risk-taking is being negated in contemporary Formula One.
Meanwhile, marginalisation, trivialisation and sexualisation persists for women. Traditionally Formula One (and most other categories), relied upon ‘grid girls’ to allegedly add ‘glamour’ to motorsport through their appearance and ornamental roles as sexy props/trophies for the ‘masculine’ drivers. In 2018, Formula One removed ‘grid girls’, proclaiming it to be an allegedly outdated practice, while reducing the overt emphasis on sexualised female ‘eye-candy’ roles. However, while arguably a positive progressive step, the lack of female driving opportunities remains a barrier. Only five female drivers have ever raced in Formula One, the last in 1992, while test driver roles have limited and curtailed, rather than offered pathways, to securing a drive in Formula One. Hence, test drivers such as Susie Wolff and Simona de Silvestro left Formula One disillusioned by the lack of future opportunities, while Carmen Jorda had a seemingly ornamental ‘development driver’ role with Lotus F1 and Renault geared towards a media emphasis on her appearance rather than driving ability. In an interrelated development, Formula W was created in 2019 as a female-only series to enhance female driving prospects, but has been met with a polarised reception to date. It is these gendered dynamics, tensions and representations surrounding Formula One that will be the focus of this chapter.
... 45 --How notions of witnessing shape liveness in the studied eventspheres is further analyzed in Section 3.3 -where I will argue that it differentiates the kairotic now from day-to-day experiences -and throughout Section 4.1, where I explore witnessing in four particular live media practices. fer various forms of continuity (see Ytreberg, 2017) in which there are many opportune moments to share content. In many cases, content that enacts being there live in the unfolding eventsphere is not instantly shared. ...
Liveness is a key concern in media studies, yet has been mostly theorized as a phenomenon related to broadcasting and is understudied for the Internet and social media. This study is an appeal for preserving liveness as a concept that continuously evolves as new media technologies emerge. The thesis challenges media theory’s conceptualization of liveness as mediated presence to an unfolding reality that exists in and of itself. It asserts that this is not only an outdated understanding, but one that impedes comprehending what “truly being there live” means. Empirical observations and analysis reveal the constructive role live media practices play in realizing live instances. Live instances, this study suggests, are realized when event-joiners align their physical event environment and the various mediated contexts in which they are continuously involved as users of smartphones, social media, TV, and direct messaging apps. It is through their live media practices that they constitute their sense of “being there live” as “being now here together,” in relation to distant times, places, and others. By investigating how live instances are situated in both physical and mediated contexts, this study contributes to and shows valuable directions for future academic research. It also offers tools that can be used for innovating the design of future media and cultural events.
... At the podium of the press conference that day were among others the Prime Minister, the Minister of Health and Care Services and the head of the NIPH. The event was a major televised media event (Ytreberg 2017) that echoed on all media platforms, including social media, in the hours and days that followed. The government representatives gave daily press conferences on the development of the spread of the virus, making sure to repeat the key points of advice with regard to social distancing and hygiene. ...
... Yet although the combination of minute planning and all-but-instantaneous worldwide diffusion has continuously increased the scale and resonance of such media-initiated events, it has also introduced a noticeable new ambivalence to their "eventfulness." 35 Already in 1962, Daniel Boorstin called attention to the increasing prominence of what he called the "pseudo-event" in Western societies. 36 And since then, similar observations have become a staple of cultural critique. ...
Whereas most theoretical and historiographical accounts of the event have focused on its present and past dimensions, this article addresses the relatively underexplored phenomenon of the future event. As temporal junctures, events often already elicit effects before they come to pass, and even if they never do. Building on foundational work on the relation between experience and expectation by Hans‐Georg Gadamer and Reinhart Koselleck as well as on current historiographical debates on “past futures,” I develop a threefold typology of the future event, distinguishing between the assumption of the routine event, the expectation of the relative event, and the adumbration of the radical event. Engaging with case studies like the year 2000, the ambivalent character of so‐called media events, and ongoing debates about a possible climate collapse and the COVID‐19 pandemic, I show how reconsidering the complex temporalities of the future event can shed new light on the ways in which past societies made their futures present.
... This top-down approach underplays the extent to which audiences and alternative media can ignore and challenge dominant readings of such events (Kyriakidou, Skey, Uldam, and McCurdy, 2018). Such criticisms are becoming even more salient in an era of digital technologies that blur the boundaries between producers and audiences, enable a range of competing narratives around particular events, and contribute to the complexity of local, national, and regional media landscapes (Sonnevend, 2016;Ytreberg, 2017). ...
The concept of media events continues to generate widespread debate among scholars around the globe. Studies that have challenged the concept’s functionalist foundations have undoubtedly sharpened our thinking. Conversely, approaches that have sought to expand the concept tend to confuse rather than clarify. In this paper, we argue that events that are planned, anticipated, and involve external organizations in their design demand a specific set of analytical tools. Furthermore, we draw a further distinction between one-off events and those that are cyclical in nature, with the latter being theorized using insights from studies of the television format industry. This approach not only focuses much needed attention on the production side of media events but also on the struggles between different interest groups (rights-holders, event hosts, media producers). We illustrate our arguments by drawing upon ethnographic material from the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest.
... Of course, television and social media aside, events have always been mediated (Ytreberg, 2017), which only makes the focus media events theory brings on the processes of mediation all the more significant -and in need of a broader encapsulation or definition. ...
Audiences are at the heart of every media event. They provide legitimation, revenue and content and yet, very few studies systematically engage with their roles from a communication perspective. This dissertation strives to fill precisely this gap in knowledge by asking how do social media audiences participate in global events? What factors motivate and shape their participation? What cultural differences emerge in content creation and how can we use the perspectives of global audiences to better understand media events and vice versa? To answer these questions, this dissertation takes a social-constructivist perspective and a multiple-method case study approach rooted in discourse analysis. It explores the ways in which global audiences are imagined and invited to participate in media events. Furthermore, it investigates how and why audiences actually make use of that invitation via an analytical framework I elaborate called architectures of participation (O’Reilly, 2004). This dissertation inverts the predominant top-down scholarly gaze upon media events – a genre of perpetual social importance – to present a much needed bottom-up intervention in media events literature. It also provides a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be a member of ‘the audience’ in a social media age, and further advances Dayan and Katz’ (1992) foundational media events theory. The findings offer new theoretical, methodological, and practical insights, which carry implications for communication and media scholars, as well as practitioners alike.
... Given the changes, some scholars have called for a re-examination of how liveness and eventfulness may or may not relate to each other (Ytreberg, 2017) and of the actual process through which happenings are turned into mediated events (Scannell, 2014). To facilitate such an interrogation, clarifications of basic terminologies are needed. ...
While the presence of cameras in courtrooms is controversial in the West, the Chinese government has promoted the live broadcasting of court trials via digital media platforms. This study situates the practice under China’s responsive authoritarianism and sees it as part of a broader governing strategy aiming at enhancing the legitimacy of the regime. An analysis of a trial surrounding the online video software QvodPlayer, supplemented with analyses of other cases, reveals the production and the possible tension involved in the live broadcast process. The analysis illustrates how court trials are typically narrated as non-eventful episodes in the official live streams, but it also demonstrates the possibility of Internet users exercising their agency through poaching the official live stream, thereby turning a trial into a real-time ‘satirefest’. Implications of the analysis on China’s evolving governing techniques and on understandings of liveness in the digital media environment are discussed.
... Recent divisive debates on 'mediatization' may also bear witness to how Media and Communication Studies struggles to establish its own 'historical vision' (Deacon and Stanyer, 2014;Lunt and Livingstone, 2016). In its shorthand applications, 'mediatization' may still invite us to think the historical process in terms of successive progress, but reflection may also go further to include ideas of interwoven eras, intensifications, accelerations, accumulations and revolutions (Balbi, 2015;Niemeyer 2011;Sonnevend, 2016;Ytreberg, 2017). How, then, is one to approach the interrelation of these assumptions: on the one hand, the waning of a shared, modern historicity, on the other, the media-induced organization of temporality, as this unfolds in the digital practices of everyday lives? ...
... (jf. også Ytreberg, 2017). I forhold til en webserie som SKAM omfatter precensing de digitale strategier, hvorigennem begivenheden bliver til og konstituerer sig som begivenhed lige her og lige nu, sammen med os og i kraft af os. ...
The article discusses strategies for creating presence in space and time in SKAM, in particular the way the series unfolds as event and its extended use of close-ups. Moreover, the article discusses Bolter and Grusin’s understanding of immediacy and argues that the many mobile screens as well as the series’ cross-mediality, or hypermediacy, contribute to the creation of an impression of being close to the characters and their world, in time and space.
... It is true that Media Events lacks an explicitly historical framework, that the slice of time its examples cover is very thin and that its ethnographical approach often draws it towards the spatial and synchronic, rather than the temporal and historical. I myself have latched on to this critique, asserting that the word 'history' in the book's subtitle merely refers to a certain status, an enduring importance that qualifies for the event to be called 'historical' (Ytreberg, 2017). That may have been too narrowly conceived. ...
This commentary on Media Events frames it as centrally being about societal transformation. The issue of transformation has been central in philosophical and historical approaches to the event, and Media Events can be considered an extension of those traditions into media studies. The commentary suggests ways that Dayan and Katz’s thinking on transformation can be developed within a historical approach to the study of events and their mediations.
Influence through utilising kitsch experiences is a domain that connects politics and management in rational planning of what is being presented to the receivers. The case study analysed in this chapter explores how kitsch serves as a tool for indistinctively continuing the prevailing ideology while simultaneously disguising itself as entertainment. The research aims to understand better the nature of contemporary, populistic, post-truth politics. As the unit of the analysis, we took the annual open-air concert transmitted by National Polish Television (TVP). During the right-wing national government period (2015–2023), the programme for the event was by definition conservative and non-transgressive, including traditional Polish mountaineer music and Romani songs along with artists perpetuating 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s nostalgia. The chapter includes a multimodal case study of a nearly 5-hour 2019 show using, as the primary analytical tool, the kitsch experience theory (Szostak & Sułkowski, Kitsch in Management: Characteristic Forms, Carriers and Propagators. Education Excellence and Innovation Management: A 2025 Vision to Sustain Economic Development during Global Challenges. Proceedings of the 35th International Business Information Management Association Conference (IBIMA), 2020; Szostak, Sztuka zarządzania. Zarządzanie sztuką. Społeczna Akademia Nauk, 2023) and a social-semiotic approach to multimodal analysis (Norris, Multimodal Discourse Analysis: A Conceptual Framework. In P. LeVine & R. Scollon (Eds.), Discourse and Technology: Multimodal Discourse Analysis (pp. 101–115). Georgetown University Press, 2004; Kress, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. Routledge, 2010). The main research goal was to explain why this kind of event can be considered a kitsch experience and how it serves as a tool for a conservative ideology while being broadcasted to the masses.
This chapter focuses on the period between 1968 and 1970 when the transnational women’s liberation movement achieved its early media success. The chapter focuses on news that circulated transnationally—the Miss America demonstration in 1968, the Miss World protest in 1970 and the US Women’s Strike for Equality in 1970—and demonstrates that the Finnish versions of these news stories presented the movement as a cultural and social phenomenon that was distant from Finland. The print media coverage often relied on news framings offered by international news agencies and translated foreign articles, but occasionally Finnish journalists also used their gatekeeping power. This became particularly clear when the women’s liberation phenomenon moved closer to Finland: the widening European movements were rarely discussed in the Finnish press.
The scale of newspaper digitization and emergence of computational research methods has opened new opportunities for scholarship on the history of the press–as well as a new set of problems. Those problems compound for research that spans national as well as linguistic contexts. This article offers a novel methodological approach for confronting these challenges by synthesizing computational with conventional methods and working across a collaborative multilingual team. We present a case study studying the transnational and multilingual news event of Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth’s journey to the United States in 1851–52. Our approach helps to demonstrate some of the characteristic patterns and complexities in transatlantic news circulation, including the pathways, reach, temporality, vagaries, and silences of this system. These patterns, in turn, offer some insights into how we understand the significance of this era for histories of the press.
According to Dayan and Katz, media events require live transmission, firmly dating their birth to the age of television. However, the application of such a media-centric criterion runs the risk of projecting an a-historical perspective to the phenomenon as such. By contrast, using the example of the public funeral of the Swedish King Oscar II in 1907, the purpose of this article is to scrutinize and categorize the different efforts on part of the journalists to create media events before broadcasting. Four types of journalistic practices are uncovered: (1) highlighting the attention of media in a broad sense in public space (such as church bells, flags, shop windows, etc.) as well as journalistic presence, to endow eventfulness to the occasion; (2) acting as witness ambassador to evoke the senses of the media audience; (3) mediating the witnessing public participating on location to emphasise the engagement of the whole society; (4) using different kinds of narrativization, such as cross-cutting, to bring a sense of immediacy to the reporting. In terms of theory, the ambition is to draw attention to the journalist’s role as a historical narrator, as well as to bring the historical perspective back to the discussion on media events.
This article sheds theoretical and empirical light on the ritual media events constructed around the deaths of three Cold War political leaders in the 1980s: the Finnish president, Urho Kekkonen (1900–1986), the Swedish prime minister, Olof Palme (1927–1986), and the Soviet Union general secretary, Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982). Investigating news articles published in the first days after the news of each death broke, as well as news articles on the funeral for each and the immediate aftermath, this study utilises historical news television and print media material, obtained from the national and media archives in Finland, Sweden and Russia. By bringing the study of media culture and history into a dialogue shared with anthropology and political history, this article produces new knowledge on the workings and outcomes of ritual media events in the context of Cold War history. The article places special emphasis on Victor Turner’s ritual analysis and the ways in which power was symbolically transformed in these societies with different political and ideological histories.
This chapter draws four overall conclusions from this project. First, the intergroup interactions between Finns, refugees, and immigrants represent cultural fusion in action. In particular, the results of this support the assertions of cultural fusion theory. Second, this research reveals new theoretical and methodological lines of inquiry for integrated threat theory. Third, the multiple group comparison approach of this project offers a more comprehensive understanding of how prejudice is manifested. Finally, the results of this study show the impact and importance of social media on migration.
The first congresses that claimed to be “international” without involving state representatives took place in the middle of the nineteenth century. In this dissertation these public meetings, with participants from many countries in Europe and America, are described as mediated events related to a specific imaginary of the public sphere. Three cases are studied in detail: two antislavery conventions that were held in London in the 1840s, a series of peace congresses that took place in Brussels, Paris, Frankfurt and London between 1848 and 1851, and four international philanthropic congresses organised in the same cities during the second half of the 1850s and in the first years of the 1860s.
The aim of the dissertation is to show that these meetings were arranged as a new form of international actors, and how different media were used to accomplish this. These early international meetings were part of a dynamic culture of public speaking in Europe in the nineteenth century, but they were also closely connected to the development of new forms of printed media. In the dissertation the meetings are analysed as multimedia events, as constellations of speech, image and text. The focus is not primarily on how the meetings transmitted information, but rather on the means by which they created legitimacy, participation and identification.
I demonstrate that the logic of the meetings was closely tied to what can be called the mobilisation of reform elites, in the sense that the organisers both presented support from such collectives, and at the same time tried to activate audiences and get them to identify as belonging to these groups. In this respect the investigation relies on a discussion of mediated publics and political representation, notably the theory of representative claims developed by the political theorist Michael Saward. As a general conclusion, I argue that this way of mobilising reform elites was central to the new type of internationality created through these meetings.
A key aspect of music-streaming services is the user’s access to their vast libraries and abundant choices anytime and anywhere. This article explores how artists performing at a large music festival in Norway were streamed before, during, and after the festival over the course of four different years. The data shows that festival streams grew by more than 40% compared to control weeks and were particularly pronounced among users who lived near the venue. The article then argues that changes in listening patterns may reflect a more general shift towards the “eventization” of streaming media.
The chapter reviews notions of the historical event as representatives of the closest available conceptual category to which the new instances of the epochal—the sixth mass extinction event, the technological singularity, and the potential transgression of planetary boundaries—can be measured. Special attention is given to three notions, developed, respectively, by Rolf Gruner (in analytic philosophy), Hayden White (in historical theory), and William Sewell (in history, political science, historical sociology). The discussion of the chapter is focused on two heavily interrelated aspects instrumental in situating the notion of the historical event with the epochal in the next chapter: first, the relationship between event and novelty, and second, the transformative potential of historical events.
Paul Virilio passed away on the 10th of September 2018. This article surveys his considerable legacy to cultural theory in order to locate a largely dormant contribution to questions of moral responsibility and experience. Whilst the phenomenological foundations of Virilio’s work are well known, it is argued here that, more than this, his work ought to be understood as an example of ethics as first philosophy. There is a certain methodological challenge to this, since Virilio’s work was, to a large extent, fragmentary, and he seldom connected the dots between essays on a disparate range of topics – from wars to cities to communication technologies – that are held in place by a sustained critique of speed and politics. As such, Virilio’s ideas are explored through three vignettes – on hikikomori, on viral events and on self-tracking – that are intended to draw these threads together under moral questions of proximity, distance and time. It is concluded that this quiescent legacy – a moral philosophy of communication too often (dis)missed as conservative moralism – ought to be taken up if we want to understand the impact of digital technology on moral experience.
In this article, the authors examine the intensification of liveness and its effects in the Charlie Hebdo attacks that took place in Paris in January 2015. In their investigation they first re-visit the existing theoretical literature on media, event and time, and discuss in particular the relationship between media events and the idea of liveness. They then move on to the empirical analysis of the Charlie Hebdo attacks and demonstrate the aspects of intensified liveness in the circulation of selected tweets. The analysis is based on a multi-method approach developed for the empirical study of hybrid media events. In conclusion, the authors argue that the liveness, experienced and carried out simultaneously on multiple platforms, favours stereotypical and immediate interpretations when it comes to making sense of the incidents unfolding before the eyes of global audiences. In this condition, incidents are interpreted ‘en direct’, but within the framework of older mnemonic schemes and mythologization of certain positions (e.g. victims, villains, heroes) in the narrative. This condition, they claim, further accelerates the conflict between the different participants that took part in the event.
This article analyses the circulation of the word ‘war’ in French anti-terrorist discourse since the 1980s. Although its use was apparent well before the attacks carried out in 2015, it experienced such a rise in frequency that it formed a discursive rupture. Its usage seeks to intensify the intentions traditionally evoked by anti-terrorist discourse by calling attention to amplification in the situation, while also seeking to justify a strategy based on exceptional circumstances.
This chapter discusses the temporal aspects of the Fukushima disaster in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Following the live press conferences of the Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano, we trace the temporal trajectory of the development of #edano_nero (‘Get some sleep, Edano!’), a Twitter hashtag that was developed by viewers of the press conferences on their second screens. The reading of live press conferences suggests that a disruptive media event can involve strong emotional dynamics and that it can include somewhat surprising registers. Our empirical findings indicate that in the traumatic situation of an ongoing disaster, social media feeds can serve not only as outlets for feelings, but also as platforms for collective emotion formation that form trajectories in time.
In this concluding chapter, we revisit the beginnings of our book and discuss the main findings of our project. The case studies presented herein are a unique combination of wide-ranging data from different sources, the innovative use of computational and qualitative methods and ambitious theoretical cross-pollination. This multifaceted approach has allowed us to address the hybrid logics of the circulation of meanings and emotions in the contemporary media environment over time. Moreover, our enquiries have made visible how mediated communication and affect are used by societies to maintain the status quo after traumatic, disruptive events. The findings provide new insight into disruptive events in the global hybrid media environment and into the way they are influenced by the factors of time, space and emotion.
Disaster marathon was proposed by media communication scholars to differentiate the genre of disaster television broadcasting from media events. However, its theoretical framework is limited by its omission of findings from disaster social science literature, and its lack of examinations of marathons of domestic natural disasters. Using the August 2014 Yunnan (China) Television Station broadcast The Special Report on the August 3 Earthquake in Ludian, Yunnan, we conduct a qualitative content analysis to empirically examine the disaster marathon concept for natural disasters. During the content analysis, three themes emerge: authorities’ command and control, the involvement of armed forces, and convergence of social support. Our case study findings contradict the disaster marathon conceptualization and conclude that the local television coverage following a natural disaster can also be performed as a series of conventional media events and is consistent with the established disaster coverage literature.
Imperial expositions held in fin-de-siècle London, Paris and Berlin were knots in a world wide web. Conceptualizing expositions as meta-media, Fleeting Cities constitutes a transnational and transdisciplinary investigation into how modernity was created and displayed, consumed and disputed in the European metropolis around 1900.
We review the research conducted to date on media events and media spectacles. We posit that the main phenomena challenging the current conceptualizations of media event and media spectacle are (1) the understanding of risk, (2) the context of disasters and (3) globalization and the mediation of news in the context of transnational and transitional societies. We suggest that more research on disruptive events is needed. In the context of the new media landscape in particular, the ritual researcher may need to take into account the concepts of temporality and unpredictability as inherent features of media events and rituals - the traumatic events researcher may benefit from the concept of global risk society. Finally, we argue that more research needs to be carried out on transitional societies, as we need to learn more about the role of mediation, events and spectacles in democratization processes and in contemporary revolutions. Overall, our findings indicate that in the context of global risk society, constant disruptions and unplanned events, together with the changes in news transmission, need to be taken as a starting point also in the research frames used to understand the mediation of events in contemporary society.
In response to Deacon and Stanyer’s article ‘Mediatization: Key Concept or Conceptual Bandwagon?’, we argue that they build their criticism on a simplified methodology. They mistake a media-centered approach for a media-centric one, and they do not capture how mediatization research engages with the complex relationship between changes in media and communication on the one hand and changes in various fields of culture and society on the other. We conclude that the emergence of the concept of mediatization is part of a paradigmatic shift within media and communication research.
Mediatization is emerging as an influential new concept that places the media at the centre of all kinds of important cultural, political and social developments. However, it has so far attracted little critical evaluation. In this article the authors identify three areas of concern, namely, how causal processes are thought about, how historical change is understood, and how concepts are designed. It is hoped this article will generate critical debate and reflection to prevent the term from being applied so inconsistently and indiscriminately that it becomes a ‘concept of no difference’.
“Event media” are media companies that produce events in order to serve their own purposes, whether these are commercial, public-service oriented, or both. For the television industry, creating big program events with a strong sense of unfolding here and now has become increasingly important – and this thesis asks why and how. It thereby examines a broad program trend, which reality-tv entertainment is a marked exponent of with programs like Big brother and Idols, but which also is represented in more educational and informative programs like Test your vote and Great X. These programs bring three industry shifts to the fore. First, their production is crossing the borders between nations, industry sectors and companies. Second, they fuel the transition of broadcasters into full-fledged media houses. Third, they turn audiences into participants on a large scale. The evolving practices on these areas are keys to the future of television, both in industrial and public life terms.
Based on longitudinal research on the media coverage of terrorist attacks, this article suggests a model of how the coverage of these attacks may be conceptualized as a media event and explores the function this serves within society. The main assumption of the model is that journalists change their ritual of news coverage when dealing with exceptional terrorist attacks; they abandon their usual normative professional frame that encompasses such activities as critical scrutiny of governmental actions, and assume a national-patriotic coverage frame that seeks to reestablish normality and restore order. The model can be useful in clarifying the media's role following terror event. While media run the risk of reinforcing the terror event by giving it the public stage its perpetrators seek, by acting as patriots and not as professionals, journalists subvert the message of the terrorists, so that instead of passing on a message of terror, dread, and alarm, the media give the attacked country and society a message of solidarity, partnership, and stubborn endurance against the terrorist threat. The model may also be useful for understanding media coverage of other crisis situations apart from massive terror attacks.
Television's coverage of the tragic events of September 11 can be viewed and understood as a paradigmatic disaster marathon. The salience of the attack's visual images, their exclusivity on the screen for a protracted period, and the invisibility of their perpetrators enhanced the attack's effectiveness. The paper highlights a number of problems that the September 11 disaster marathon poses to the profession of journalism and to society, and points out possible remedies for the future. It ends with a short discussion of the ways in which television's coverage of the event both resembled and differed from the media-event model, and of theoretical aspects of its unique dimensions as a disaster marathon.
hayden white is University Professor, Emeritus, at the University of California and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University.
This book explores crucial moments of change in society's “regimes of historicity,” or its ways of relating to the past, present, and future. Deriving inspiration from Hannah Arendt, Reinhart Koselleck, and Paul Ricoeur, the book analyzes a broad range of texts, positioning The Odyssey as a work on the threshold of historical consciousness and contrasting it with an investigation of the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins's concept of “heroic history.” The text tracks changing perspectives on time in Chateaubriand's Historical Essay and Travels in America and sets them alongside other writings from the French Revolution. The book revisits the insights of the French Annales School and situates Pierre Nora's Realms of Memory within a history of heritage and today's presentism, from which it addresses Jonas's notion of our responsibility for the future. Our presentist present is by no means uniform or clear-cut, and it is experienced very differently depending on the position we occupy in society. We are caught up in global movement and accelerated flows, or else condemned to the life of casual workers, living from hand to mouth in a stagnant present, with no recognized past, and no real future either (since the temporality of plans and projects is inaccessible). The present is therefore experienced as emancipation or enclosure, and the perspective of the future is no longer reassuring, since it is perceived not as a promise, but as a threat. The book shows how the motor of history(-writing) has stalled and helps the reader understand the contradictory qualities of contemporary presentist relation to time.
In this fascinating and accessible book, author Stephanie Marriott engages in a close and detailed analysis of the nature of live television. The book examines the transformations in our experience of time and space which are brought about by the capacity of broadcasting to bring us the world in the moment in which it is unfolding, situating the live television event in the context of an expanding and increasingly complex global communicative framework. Building her argument by means of a series of case studies of events as diverse as the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001, the 2005 London bombings, election night coverage and live sports coverage, the author provides a meticulous and articulate account of the way in which live television mediates the event for its audience.
Mediatization has emerged as a key concept to reconsider old, yet fundamental questions about the role and influence of media in culture and society. In particular the theory of mediatization has proved fruitful for the analysis of how media spread to, become intertwined with, and influence other social institutions and cultural phenomena like politics, play and religion.
This book presents a major contribution to the theoretical understanding of the mediatization of culture and society. This is supplemented by in-depth studies of:
The mediatization of politics: From party press to opinion industry;
The mediatization of religion: From the faith of the church to the enchantment of the media;
The mediatization of play: From bricks to bytes;
The mediatization of habitus: The social character of a new individualism.
Mediatization represents a new social condition in which the media have emerged as an important institution in society at the same time as they have become integrated into the very fabric of social and cultural life. Making use of a broad conception of the media as technologies, institutions and aesthetic forms, Stig Hjarvard considers how characteristics of both old and new media come to influence human interaction, social institutions and cultural imaginations.
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De nombreux ouvrages portent sur l'histoire de et à la télévision. En revanche, la question de l'importance de ce média en tant qu'acteur spécifique de l'histoire ou en tant que constructeur des mémoires collectives reste souvent en suspens. Cet ouvrage s'intéresse au lien qu'entretient le journal télévisé avec l'histoire, la mémoire et l'historiographie. Ancré dans une apparente démarche d'actualité, le journal télévisé est également la plateforme d'une expérience du temps présent historique. Les images de la chute du mur de Berlin et du 11 Septembre 2001 en sont des exemples. L'analyse de ces deux événements et de leur commémoration montre que le journal télévisé intervient dans la construction des mémoires collectives et révèle également que la télévision s'insinue parfois dans le déroulement même de l'événement, devenant ainsi un acteur de l'histoire en cours. De plus, les années 1990 sont marquées par de profonds changements sur les plans politique et médiatique. L'essor des nouvelles technologies permet au journal télévisé de proposer un direct encore plus performant. C'est ainsi que le 11 Septembre 2001 présente l'apogée tragique d'une évolution qui a commencé avec la chute du communisme. La télévision est prise en otage et raconte ainsi une tout autre histoire.
This item was submitted for publication in the journal, Media, Culture and Society [SAGE Publications Ltd / © The Author(s)]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0163443715580761.
We live in an age where the media is intensely global and profoundly changed by digitalization. Not only do many media events have audiences who access them online, but additionally digital media flows are generating new ways in which media events can emerge. In times of increasingly differentiated media technologies and fragmented media landscapes, the ‘eventization’ of the media is increasingly important for the marketing and everyday appreciation of popular media texts.
The events covered include Celebrity Big Brother, 9/11, the Iraq war and World Youth Day 2005 to give readers an understanding of the major debates in this increasingly high-profile area of media and cultural research.
The conquest of the South Pole by Roald Amundsen and his team of explorers in 1911 became a major international media event by virtue of Amundsen's ‘Race for the Pole’ against Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated expedition. This article shows how Roald Amundsen and his team entered into close collaborations with journalists, as well as engaging in extensive feats of media management. It also discusses how various media came together to build the media event, forming a ‘media ensemble’. The roles of books, photography, cinematography and newspapers are highlighted. On a conceptual level, this article considers possible differences between events involving the media ensemble from the previous turn of the century, and media events from the subsequent broadcast-dominated period. It comparatively discusses the tradition of media event research building on Dayan and Katz and a recent German strand of research into historical media events.
In a context where the study of communications tends to focus only on the mobility of information, to the neglect of that of people and commodities, this article explores the potential for a closer integration between the fields of communications and transport studies. Against the presumption that the emergence of virtuality means that material geographies are no longer of consequence, the role of mediated ‘technologies of distance’ is considered here in the broader contexts of the construction (and regulation) of a variety of physical forms of mobility and the changing modes of articulation of the virtual and material worlds.
Taking Dayan and Katz’s argument of media event as the point of departure, I want to not only assess the relevance of media event theory to a non liberal-democratic media system such as China but, more importantly, to argue that ‘media events’ need to be studied in juxtaposition to what I refer to as ‘media stories’ in order to yield insight into the complexity and ambiguity of the Chinese mediasphere. I show that whereas media events are about spectacles, official time and grand history, media stories are mostly about everyday life, unofficial time and individual memory. I argue that the co-existence of conflicting temporalities between the official media and commercial media contributes to a process of fragmentation and dispersal of a sense of national space and time. I further argue that although media events and media stories perform different spatial-temporal duties and functions in the way in which the nation is imagined, there is a complicity between nationalist discourses and transnational processes in contemporary China.
This article explores the connections between reality television and older print and electronic media formats. It surveys the history of audience participation in the media through a series of case studies drawn from Britain, Australia and the United States: periodicals featuring significant contributions from their readers in the 1880s; confessional magazines in the 1920s; mass-market women’s magazines during the inter-war years; talkback radio since the 1960s; and the emergence of ‘real life’ media genres in the 1980s and 1990s. The article argues that media producers have, for more than a century, been blurring the notion of the passive media consumer.
The international success of formats such as Pop Idol and Big Brother owes much to the ways in which they combine a number of broadcast and digital platforms under the aegis of a common 'brand'. The article argues that the media industry strategists behind such formats have come to rely on extending existing broadcast conventions of liveness and eventfulness by means of audience participation via digital return channels. It argues that such participation invites a sense of presence, heightened immediacy and involvement in the live event. The article emphasizes how such features are being developed by the broadcast media industry to exploit audience participation for the purposes of revenue, competitive edge and strategic expansion.
In the early 1990s, the response to the nation-building challenge in South Africa came most visibly through the adoption of rainbow nationalism, associated with Nelson Mandela and articulated through the medium of television. This article examines three powerful televised ‘spectacles’ – Mandela's release, his inauguration and the 1995 Rugby World Cup – all of which constituted ‘media events’ in the sense described by Dayan and Katz. The article argues that the illusion of a reconciled nation displayed in these broadcasts facilitated South Africa's transition, but also elided some of the complexities of the era.
We sense a retreat from the genres of "media events" (Dayan and Katz, 1992)--the ceremonial Contests, Conquests and Coronations that punctuated television's first 50 years ---and a corresponding rise in the live broadcasting of disruptive events such as Disaster, Terror and War. We believe that cynicism, disenchantment and segmentation are undermining attention to ceremonial events, while the mobility and ubiquity of television technology, together with the downgrading of scheduled programming, provide ready access to disruption. If ceremonial events may be characterized as "co-productions" of broadcasters and establishments, then disruptive events may be characterized as "co-productions" of broadcasters and anti-establishment agencies, i.e. the perpetrators of disruption. I Media Events, as defined by Dayan and Katz (1992), are public ceremonies, deemed historic, and broadcast live on television. The genre, and its study, owes a lot to Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt. In 1977, Sadat announced that he would personally come to Jerusalem to offer peace in exchange for the territory which Israel had taken from Egypt in the war of 1967. Live television accompanied almost every moment of his three-day visit to Jerusalem, enthralling Israelis as well as Egyptians, attracting the reluctant attention of the other Arab countries, and the fascination of the rest of the world.
The theory of media events developed by Dayan and Katz is extended in an analysis of Franklin Roosevelt's first eight fireside chats. Roosevelt's fireside chats were structured in both form and content by the new mode of publicness initiated by the culture industries in the 20th century. Roosevelt employed the idioms of mass culture to close the perceptual gap between him and his mass audience. As media events, the chats were useful in dramatizing a new symbolic geography of the American imagined community for the mass public, and thus in introducing to this public a set of new identities and practices appropriate to 20th-century mass politics.
In this classic text, James W. Carey maintains that communication is not merely the transmission of information; reminding the reader of the link between the words "communication" and "community," he broadens his definition to include the drawing-together of a people that is culture. In this context, Carey questions the American tradition of focusing only on mass communication's function as a means of social and political control, and makes a case for examining the content of a communication-the meaning of symbols, not only the motives that originate them or the purposes they serve. He seeks to recast the goal of communication studies, replacing the search for deterministic laws of behavior with a simpler, yet far more challenging mission: "to enlarge the human conversation by comprehending what others are saying." This new edition includes a new critical foreword by G. Stuart Adam that explains Carey's fundamental role in transforming the study of mass communication to include a cultural perspective and connects his classic essays with contemporary media issues and trends. This edition also adds a new, complete bibliography of all of Carey's writings.
Debates about the nature of the Enlightenment date to the eighteenth century, when Imanual Kant himself addressed the question, âWhat is Enlightenment?â The contributors to this ambitious book offer a paradigm-shifting answer to that now-famous query: Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation. Enlightenment, they argue, needs to be engaged within the newly broad sense of mediation introduced hereânot only oral, visual, written, and printed media, but everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in between. With essays addressing infrastructure and genres, associational practices and protocols, this volume establishes mediation as the condition of possibility for enlightenment. In so doing, it not only answers Kantâs query; it also poses its own broader question: how would foregrounding mediation change the kinds and areas of inquiry in our own epoch? This Is Enlightenment is a landmark volume with the polemical force and archival depth to start a conversation that extends across the disciplines that the Enlightenment itself first configured.
A fascinating tour of all of the ways we have thought about communication, now and in the past. Today, it is the Internet. One hundred years ago, it was the telegraph. And before that? Networks of road, rail, and water. It's all "communication." The Invention of Communication invites us to explore all the multifarious meanings that have made up our age-old attempts to connect. The book offers a heady tour of the multiple usages and systems that each historic period puts forth in the name of communication. A veritable history of the idea of the social, Armand Mattelart's genealogy maps the many means by which humans interact-from carefully cataloguing Others, to asserting power over them, to working together with them to build new forms of community. Studying a vast array of modern forms of social intercourse and control, The Invention of Communication takes up topics such as the elaboration of warfare as a logistic, the rise of professional societies of propaganda and national propagation, the history of universal expositions and world fairs, the birth of documentary film out of physiological investigations in the nineteenth century, the development of the popular press and the popular novel, and the origins of American social science. This history runs from the circuits of exchange to the circulation of goods, people, and messages, from the construction of railroads to the emergence of long-distance communication. Throughout, Mattelart brings a clarifying perspective to the ideologies and theories that accompany these transformations. He shows how Enlightenment and nineteenthÃÂcentury utopian thinking about communication led to the strategic and geopolitical thinking of the twentieth century, and finally to mass and individual psychosociology, mass culture, and marketing. The Invention of Communication is a remarkable interpretation of the dizzying complex of systems supporting the social world of modernity. "Mattelart has, in a way, produced something of an academic cocktail. A blend of thoughts of some of the greatest scholars over the last two to three hundred years mixed to produce a series of claims about the importance of communication issues at central moments in the emergence of our modern times." Semiotica Armand Mattelart is professor of information and communication sciences at the Université de HauteÃÂBretagne, France. He is the author of Mapping World Communication (Minnesota, 1994) and coauthor (with Michèle Mattelart) of Rethinking Media Theory (Minnesota, 1992). Susan Emanuel lives in Massachusetts and France. Among her translations are Mapping World Communication (Minnesota, 1994) by Armand Mattelart as well as The Contemplation of the World by Michel Maffesoli (Minnesota, 1996).
