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.
The term 'vintage' is common in our modern-day vocabulary. The concept to which it refers is familiar in the fields of oenology and fashion studies but has also, more recently, appeared in those of ...media and cultural studies. However, a theoretical and historical exploration of its evolution prior to the 20th century is still missing from much literature. This article is a first attempt to fill this gap by discussing patterns of vintage in contrast to retro and kitsch (notions with which it is often blurred). Vintage and its relationship with nostalgia and media are then analysed as part of the discourses and practices that engage with contemporary obsessions with the past. An examination of historical and more recent vintage patterns also leads us to discuss the uses and production of analogue and digital vintage objects. On a more general level this reflection on vintage within media studies might also be inspiring for other research or professional domains.
Shortly after the suicide bombings and mass shootings that took place in and around Paris on 13 November 2015, journalists of the French daily newspaper Le Monde decided to honor and commemorate the ...victims by publishing their portraits and creating an online memorial called #EnMemoire (#InRemembrance). Until now, studies of these types of memorials have concentrated primarily on analyses of portraits and their narratives. They have not, however, focused on the environments in which they were produced and received. Likewise, no study has yet explored the journalist’s role or the place of empathy in the online-memorial creation process. Based on memory and journalism studies, this article discusses therefore the online memorial creation process and the role empathy plays in the ways journalists—as mediators of mourning—and readers interact with each other. It also addresses sensitivities the study researcher developed after experiencing these events.
This article addresses the lack of analysis of the specific ways in which the online environment configures the relationship between the processual dynamics of nostalgia which allow for both creative ...and conservative modes of identification and the commercial exploitation and commodification of the nostalgia produced and articulated in online communities. We introduce an empirical case study of one of the companies operating on Facebook as a nostalgia maker: DoYouRemember.com and consider analytical frameworks for future work on the (online) ‘nostalgia business’ and its economic and political dimensions.
Un pouvoir presque magique des mots se dégage dès l’ouverture de l’ouvrage de Manuel Castells : il nous fait part de son univers personnel qui pénètre sa réflexion scientifique. Il s’agit en vérité ...d’un enchevêtrement touchant et limpide, d’une entrée en la matière qui permet au lecteur de saisir le pouvoir et la force qu’occupe la communication dans la pensée même de l’auteur tout en dégageant les limites et impossibilités de l’expression libre et démocratique dans un régime contraignant qui...
This article focuses on analogue postcards as a communicative and artistic tool for potentially engaging nostalgically with the past, present, and future. It poses questions about the experience of ...time and place in a specific setting (the city of Montreal, Canada), as well as in a specific project that looks at cultural mediation in public spaces. During the summer of 2017, Comptoir public, an organization that works with artists and cultural mediators, launched the project “Postes du futur” ( Mail from the Future). The organizers asked Montrealers to write a postcard to a recipient of the sender's choosing, so that it will be mailed in 2042 during the celebration of Montreal's 400th anniversary (i.e., 25 years later). One of our main findings is that most of these postcards will be sent to the current addresses of future recipients. Choosing one's home as one of the settings to write to and to write about finally made it possible to connect to the historical and medical meaning of nostalgia: the homesickness, the yearning for a place of one's own, for a space we now miss prospectively on in the future. Home, where people live their lives, is not yet “lost” or “left behind.” But anticipating its loss and transfer to others becomes one of the primordial factors shaping instantaneous nostalgia and its expression—a future in which postcard senders are no longer present or even alive. The issue of the finiteness and the irreversibility of time is usually an indicator of past-oriented nostalgia. In our case, it is projected toward the future. The printed, analogue postcard becomes the writing space that leaves room for anticipated and anticipatory nostalgia and for imagining future communication technologies.
The relation between nostalgia and media is imbricated. Media—used in institutions, industry, or technology—can be a platform for expressing nostalgia, but they can also be the object of nostalgia. ...This relation makes media a complex and interesting domain to study from a psychological, historical, cultural, environmental, or social perspective on nostalgia. Moreover, nostalgia has been intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic, and media texts as well as social networks have helped to heal personal and collective moments of crisis by providing resources to actively rethink the past and the future. This paper discusses the (historically) profound relations between media, technologies and nostalgia.
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