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.
The aim of this study is to enrich Beck's (2016) concept of methodological cosmopolitanism and digital metamorphosis from the perspective of communication researchers using a ‘media event', namely ...the live broadcasting of history through communication technology (Dayan and Katz 1992) as the research unit. Based on our observation of media events of environmental crises in China, we argue that digital metamorphoses are happening, albeit in a complicated form. These disruptive events that netizens evoke, participate in and resolve make a stronger and longer lasting impact on the social consensus about environmental protections than do pre‐set pseudo‐events. The effects of the digital empowerment of people are, however, case specific and the nation‐state still dominates many media events pertaining to environmental crises.
This article investigates the ritual work in terrorist news events, using the Berlin truck attack as a case in point. The article connects with the larger cluster of anthropologically inspired ...communication research on media events as public rituals in news media and applies digital media ethnography as its method. Fieldwork is conducted in 15 online news sites. The article identifies three key phases through which the ritual work was carried out: the rupture in the news event (ritualised as the strike), the liminal phase (ritualised as the manhunt) and the reconstitution of order following the attack (ritualised as the mourning). The article concludes with an interpretation of the broader social implications of the ritual work and related naturalisation of ‘friends’ and ‘foes’ and suggests that this type of ritual work contributes to a collective mythologisation of terrorism in news media and society at large.
Under the Dome, a video about smog in China produced by author and former television anchor Chai Jing, garnered 200 million views within 48 hours before disappearing from major Chinese websites. This ...essay examines the video's aesthetics, distribution and reception with a particular attention to its relation to time. I argue that a focus on temporality allows us to discern the ideological conditions that delimit how we talk about Under the Dome and indeed China's pollution in the context of neoliberal globalization. The celebration of the video's digitally enabled instantaneity not only privileges technological solutions and consumer agency but also obscures the unequal relation of power to which the Chinese state and the workers within the global electronics supply chain have long been subject. What these discourses eclipse is an opportunity to rethink the accidental event as opening an alternative dialogue about the geological deep time of media culture.
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 2017, (former) Google employee James Damore shared with colleagues a 10-page memo which ruminated over and rearticulated normative assumptions about gender equity in the technology sector. The ...memo contested Google's pro-diversity narrative with 'fragmented speculations' - or antenarratives - about alternative organizational futures (Boje, Haley, and Saylors 2016, 391). The memo was subsequently leaked to an online news site and a 'new media event' formed from the reflexive circulation of discourse of the ensuing controversy Fu (2018). We analyse this corpus of texts in terms of 'antestories' being told about Google and we consider how these storytelling episodes align with or challenge the company's preferred pro-diversity future. We consider the material-discursive conditions which influenced the storytelling episodes and the stories which were ultimately heard (Jorgensen, Strand, and Boje 2013). We argue that 'Damoregate' serves as a cautionary tale for organizational communication, particularly the implications of alternative progress narratives in employee 'antestories' and the limitations of relying on organizational (ante)narratives in a digital era.
This article suggests a new methodological model for the study of hybrid media events with global appeal. This model, developed in the project on the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, was created ...specifically for researching digital media—and in particular, Twitter. The article is structured as follows. Firstly, the methodological scope is discussed against the theoretical context, e.g. the theory of media events. In the theoretical discussion, special emphasis is given to i) disruptive, upsetting, or disintegrative media events and hybrid media events and ii) the conditions of today’s heterogeneous and globalised media communication landscape. Secondly, the article introduces a multi-method approach developed for the analysis of hybrid media events. In this model, computational social science—namely, automated content analysis (ACA) and social network analytics (SNA)—are combined with a qualitative approach—specifically, digital ethnography. The article outlines three key phases for research in which the interplay between quantitative and qualitative approaches is played out. In the first phase, preliminary digital ethnography is applied to provide the outline of the event. In the second phase, quantitative social network analytics are applied to construct the digital field for research. In this phase, it is necessary to map a) what is circulating on the websites and b) where this circulation takes place. The third and final phase applies a qualitative approach and digital ethnography to provide a more nuanced, in-depth interpretation of what (substance/content) is circulating and how this material connects with the ‘where’ in the digital landscape, hence constituting links and connections in the hybrid media landscape. In conclusion, the article reflects on how this multi-method approach contributes to understanding the workings of today’s hybrid media events: how they create and maintain symbolic battles over certain imagined constructs of social imaginaries of solidarity, belonging, contestation, and exclusion, a topic of core value for the theory of media events.
This article argues that the increasing use of press images around 1900 contributed to the construction of the political persona of the British Statesman Joseph Chamberlain. These images fused scenes ...from his public and private life and, paradoxically, the new focus on his private characteristics reinforced his public role. His private life did not replace his public side, nor was the private unrelated to politics as celebrity scholarship suggests, but these projected private characteristics widened the scope of what it meant to be a politician in a mass mediated environment. This argument is made through an analysis of the media context in which Chamberlain matured as a politician and the press images of his public and private life. Particularly the many (re)published images of Chamberlain during the 'media event' of his death in 1914 are used methodologically to trace the evolution of the visual depiction of politics through time.
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.
In this essay, we explicate the internal logic of contemporary terrorist acts and our society’s responses, to denaturalize the label and meanings we give to “terrorism.” We argue that contemporary ...terrorism communicates intimidation, fear, and anxiety through the ritualization and mediatization of terrorist attacks. Mediatization refers to the strategic coercion of imperative media coverage of the attacks, and ritualization refers to the focus on sacred life structures in both terrorist attacks and remedial responses. In combining ritualization and mediatization, terrorism aims to introduce maximal chaos through unexpected disruption of the sacred and taken-for-granted in everyday life in the community of the attack and wherever media coverage can reach. The fear and anxiety induced by disrupted life rhythms, including normal media flows, and the compelling footage of the disruption lead to ritualized reactions which both restore and transform the social order beyond the moment of the attack.
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