Espen Ytreberg’s research while affiliated with University of Oslo and other places

The emergence of key concepts in Reinhart Koselleck’s sense has been much discussed in conceptual history, but mainly for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The article documents a post–World War II emergence of the concept of health, from relative anonymity to becoming a key concept, comparable to concepts such as politics , democracy , and culture . While previous research has emphasized conceptual mobility, this article focuses on conceptual aggregation, where the concept of health assembles and assimilates meanings, becoming essential to discourse. This is explained with reference to the development of the welfare state and the political use of a positive, expanded health concept. The article utilizes a collocation analysis of Norwegian digitized newspapers 1950–2010, culled from the uniquely extensive database of the Norwegian National Library.

The COVID-19 pandemic has largely been made sense of as a crisis . However, using crisis as a temporal-analytical category arguably obscures the complexity of the different temporalities at work in the pandemic. In this article, we examine how the pandemic outbreak led to numerous acts of synchronisation and de-synchronisation—between humans and viruses, between social groups and even between historical ages. In order to make sense of the temporal consequences of an epidemic, we introduce the concept of ‘temporal technologies’, understood as a set of procedures that control, regulate, produce and assemble time in relational networks of both human and non-human actors. This article thus attempts to create a framework for understanding the epidemic experience in temporal terms by using ‘temporal technologies’ as an analytical tool.

The multiple nature of time has by now been well established across a wide range of scholarly traditions in the humanities and social sciences. The article takes that insight as a starting point, in order to discuss the tools, work, sites and contestations involved in common temporal frameworks and structures that cross and join together time’s multiplicities. We thus articulate and discuss key components of synchronisation, a concept with significant potential for understanding common temporalities and social orders. Our emphasis is particularly on media, their technological and representational affordances for synchronisation. The article’s approach to social and mediated times presents an alternative to Hartmut Rosa and François Hartog’s influential theories about the temporal configuration of the present historical moment. Their understanding of the present tends more towards unity and uniformity, particularly by means of chronology. We follow Luhmann in arguing that ‘there is no supersynchronization’ producing such privileged, unitary temporal orders. We propose pursuing an understanding of both present and past through investigations of synchronisation itself, which always exists in plural, always involves different synchronisations in competition with each other, is subject to social and historical contingencies. The article combines theoretical and conceptual arguments with historical and contemporary cases. We investigate the synchronisation of national collectives by means of broadcast media, of individuals in everyday life by means of social media, and the recalibration of various contemporary media to a global scale in order to tackle the issue of climate change. These cases move from past and relatively comprehensive forms of synchronisation, via more localised forms today, to highly uncertain and heterogeneous ones in the future.

The summer of 1928 was marked by two internationally reported and disastrous events involving two polar explorers: the crash and rescue of Umberto Nobile’s airship ‘Italia’ in the polar regions of the North Atlantic ocean, and the death of the Roald Amundsen, en route to rescuing Nobile. The article discusses these disasters as indicative of a historical moment in the mediation of events where technological and logistical developments enabled a continuous news coverage of radically remote locations. It argues that these new affordances came with an increased and pervasive sense of uncertainty about the veracity of factual information. Analyzing Norwegian newspaper coverage, the article finds a range of articulations of this uncertainty, including a preoccupation with rumours and speculations, as well as with chronic difficulties in determining factual veracity.

This article explores how personal experience in the form of human interest stories has become a road to visibility, legitimacy, and impact for organizational actors and interest groups. Focusing on news media representations of health, where patients and their experiences with disease play an increasingly central role across media platforms, the article theorizes the hierarchies and dilemmas of a “human interest economy” in which ordinary people become exemplars, based on the authenticity of their experience, and their ability to attract attention and support. Departing from 38 interviews with management and communications professionals in Norwegian health interest groups, the article analyzes how organizations that provide exemplars to the news media adapt to and negotiate generic human interest formats that favor certain diseases, victims, and storylines over others. By discussing how the normative claims of immediate and authentic bottom-up voices in the news media tie in with less visible and more implicit strategic interests, the article adds to the theorizing about the role and power of ordinary people in the news, and how they serve the strategic interests of organizational actors that liaise between journalists and participants.

This article discusses the relationship between nonprofessional media participation and the professional handling of participants. It expands on the case of “Karen”, who related her life-threatening illness and patient experience in a broad range of media before transitioning into professional communications work for a health organization that required her to recruit other patient-participants. The article contributes to research on media participation by focusing on the blurred boundaries between professionals and nonprofessionals. It describes how relationships between the two can be characterized by tensions and dilemmas that are closely tied to issues of status and control. Karen’s case is instructive in the particular light it sheds on such matters and on how control over the mediated telling of a life story is exercised.

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.

Starting in the 1980s as an industry buzzword sporadically used by academics, “convergence” rose to prominence in the 1990s and early 2000s as a catchall term for the coming together of various media by means of digital technology. Convergence has become entrenched and institutionalized as a key concept in media studies, in close association with concepts such as digitalization and interactivity. At the same time it has been regarded with suspicion for its vagueness, all-inclusiveness, and air of media industry hype.

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.

The article explores television scheduling in the phase of proliferation, a period following phases of monopoly and competition, characterized by a drastic multiplication of content, television channels, and new platforms. Based on interviews with professionals involved in scheduling and cross-platform promotion at Norway’s four main broadcasters, a sample study of actual cross-platform promotion, and relevant statistics for the Norwegian TV market, the article explores changes in scheduling with a particular focus on the distinction between commercial and public service television. The transformations in scheduling are addressed in relation to the broader question of how television is developing in the “post-network” era. The article argues that contrary to claims that scheduling has become obsolete, analyses show that it continues to be a central craft within the television industry, one responding actively to times of change, revising its tools and developing new ones.