scholarly journals Introduction: Toward Hybrid Media Events of Terrorist Violence

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Maaria Sumiala ◽  
Katja Valaskivi
Keyword(s):  
Special Section ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Violent Media ◽  
Media Events ◽  
Hybrid Dynamics ◽  
Discursive Politics ◽  
Media Event ◽  
Terrorist Violence

This is an introdcution to a special section in the journal in which we examine terrorism as a media event. The introduction reviews the classic works by Elihu Katz and Daniel and adds our own contemporary extension of their theories. It acknowledges the significance of temporality and related mnemonic patterns (Zelizer, Kraidy, in this introduction); networked, relational territorialities (Kraidy, in this introduction); and the discursive politics applied to categorize the violence in question (Hervik; Cui and Rothenbuhler; Price, in this introduction), but it also suggests a more detailed focus on the hybrid dynamics between actors, platforms, and messages which circulate during violent media events. The authors continue the debate on the complex relationship between media, event, and terror by introducing hybridity as yet another angle to this topical discussion.

scholarly journals From Media Events to Expressive Events: An Interview with Daniel Dayan

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-187
Author(s):  
Johanna Maaria Sumiala ◽  
Katja Valaskivi ◽  
Daniel Dayan
Keyword(s):  
Communication Studies ◽  
Media Events ◽  
Event Theory ◽  
Thoughtful Reflection ◽  
Media And Communication ◽  
Media Event ◽  
Theoretical Reflection ◽  
Terrorist Violence

In this interview, Professor Daniel Dayan provides a philosophical and theoretical reflection on the development of media event theory and its influence in media and communication studies since 1990s. He reveals the main theoretical premises and inspirations behind the theory and provides a thoughtful reflection of the historical situation in which the theory was developed. The latter part of the interview observes the present day terrorist violence in the framework of media event theory.

scholarly journals The Associative Dictionary of Media Events in the Early XXI Century: a New Lexicographic Concept

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 1069-1078
Author(s):  
Ya. A. Dudareva ◽  
N. N. Shpilnaya ◽  
T. V. Moskvitina
Keyword(s):  
Special Problem ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
Lexical Representation ◽  
Collective Consciousness ◽  
Russian Speakers ◽  
Media Events ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Media ◽  
Cultural Linguistics ◽  
Media Event

The article introduces a new concept of the Associative Dictionary of Media Events of the Early XXI Century. The project continues the traditions of common lexicography. As a rule, common lexicography is part of a special problem field described by various antinomies, e.g. objective vs. subjective in the language, individual vs. collective, descriptive vs. prescriptive approaches to the lexical representation in dictionaries, etc. The new dictionary represents a snapshot of everyday media consciousness and thus belongs to descriptive lexicographic projects. The dictionary is based on an associative experiment that involved Russian and French speakers. While traditional associative dictionaries contain the most frequent vocabulary, this project represents the conceptual meanings of various media events that exist in the everyday collective consciousness. The new dictionary belongs to media linguistics, descriptive lexicography, and interpretive linguistics. The present article describes the technology of its compilation, substantiates its relevance and novelty, and offers a sample entry using the case of the COVID-19 pandemic and its representation in the Russian language. Each media event consisted of two associative nests: one was based on the reactions of respondents who were familiar with the stimulus, whereas the other demonstrated reactions of participants unfamiliar with the media event. The epidemic being global, such key lexemes as "covid" and "coronavirus" lost their agnonymity for Russian speakers, and the media event appeared to have a zero agnonymous associative nest. The paper also provides a linguistic commentary on the covid entry, which summed up all the reactions received during the associative experiment. The lexicographic project can be of interest to specialists in media, political, cognitive, and cultural linguistics.

The Black Panther Has Died

2016 ◽  
pp. 158-171
Author(s):  
Samuel Mateus
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Social Integration ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
Public Events ◽  
Media Events ◽  
The Media ◽  
Portuguese Society ◽  
Media Event

Media ecology is characterized today by the frequent airing of disruptive events. The shared experience of broadcasting is thus taken by disenchantment, fragmentation and individualization. Does this mean that integrative and ceremonial media events are condemned to disappear? What about media rituals and collective consensus? In this chapter, we argue that the Media Events category is not just an invaluable frame to understand contemporary television but it is also a vital process on the way societies re-work their solidarities, negotiate collective belonging and publicly stage social rituals. Analysing the live coverage of the funerary ceremonies of Eusébio, the Portuguese world-wide football legend, we address this major social occurrence approaching it as a death media event, a public mourning ceremonial and a tele-ritual. Media events are still a powerful example of how media plays a major role on social integration and national identity. The television broadcast of Eusébio's funeral - it is claimed - constitutes a key example, in the Portuguese society, of the integrative dimension of public events.

scholarly journals Media Events

Communication ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Sonnevend
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Arab Country ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
World Cup ◽  
Presidential Debates ◽  
Media Events ◽  
Media Spectacle ◽  
Large Audience ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Event

“Media event” seems like a concept that has been around forever, but it is a relatively new invention in media research. Its origins can be found in Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz’s canonical book titled Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History, published in 1992 by Harvard University Press. The event that inspired Dayan and Katz was the visit of Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat to Israel in 1977. While seemingly only a ceremonial media spectacle, this first official visit from an Arab country to Jerusalem in fact led to a (so far) lasting peace between Israel and Egypt. It was a powerful example of successful media diplomacy that captured the imagination of Dayan and Katz, so much so that they spent the next decade trying to grasp the magic of events in media. In Dayan and Katz’s strict taxonomy, an event would qualify for inclusion as a “media event” only if it fulfilled eight requirements. It had to (1) be broadcast live by television, (2) constitute an interruption of everyday life and everyday broadcasting, (3) be preplanned and scripted, and (4) be viewed by a large audience. There should also be (5) a normative expectation that viewing was obligatory and (6) a reverent, awe-filled narration, and the event had to be (7) integrative of society and (8) mostly conciliatory. Dayan and Katz presented three basic scripts of media events. These were contests (for instance, the World Cup, the Olympic Games, and the presidential debates), conquests (such as the landing on the moon and Pope John Paul II’s visit to Communist Poland), and coronations (for example, the funerals of President Kennedy and Indira Gandhi, the coronation of Elizabeth II, and the royal wedding of Charles and Diana). Overall, Dayan and Katz achieved a genuinely new understanding of events in media, inspiring further theoretical developments and empirical studies in communication studies and other disciplines. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History was published after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in a particularly hopeful time of history. Traumatic events, especially the 9/11 attacks, prompted many scholars, including Dayan and Katz, to revise the media event concept to include nonceremonial, unplanned events—for instance, wars, disasters, and terrorist attacks as covered by a wide variety of “new” and “old” media.

scholarly journals Contestation, a Deeper Seduction

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-57
Author(s):  
Peter Zuurbier
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Media Events ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Event

Individual media events, from the extraordinary to the mundane, as well as the logic they present, have transcended society. Media events no longer happen in isolation, they are intertextually and extratextually linked and mixed together. The ability to view, create, join in, and affect the shape of media events has caused a profound shift in the conception of what they are. What Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz refer to as individual media events, Guy Debord, Michel Foucault and Douglas Kellner consider collectively as spectacle. Their work on media events and spectacle features a debate on the role of contestation within it. Live audience members have an opportunity to impact media events and the spectacle either through individual or collective action. This action can go along with the intents ascribed to the media event and spectacle, or it can oppose them. Contestation often takes the form of an oppositional interruption of the linear messaging promoted within media events and spectacle. Contestation is typically a strategy used by voices that feel marginalized by the images of the spectacle. But contestation of media events and spectacle through their own logic becomes a means of deeper seduction.

scholarly journals Charlie Hebdo, 2015: ‘Liveness’ and acceleration of conflict in a hybrid media event

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Sumiala ◽  
Minttu Tikka ◽  
Katja Valaskivi
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Empirical Analysis ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Media Events ◽  
Multi Method Approach ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Empirical Analysis ◽  
Method Approach ◽  
Media Event ◽  
Charlie Hebdo

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.

Critical Role of Emotions in Media Events

2016 ◽  
pp. 179-195
Author(s):  
Monika Verbalytė
Keyword(s):  
Critical Role ◽  
Theoretical Argument ◽  
Empirical Inquiry ◽  
Media Events ◽  
Specific Emotion ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Sociology Of Emotion ◽  
Media Event

This contribution relates recent theoretizations of media events with the emotion theory in order to get a better picture of what role emotions play in these events. Critical view toward media events helps to understand the limitations of the claims made by those who established this concept 30 years ago: Rather than instances magically integrating society, media events are seen as struggles over the meaning in the contested media field where by far not every winning meaning enhances societal integration. Additionally, psychology and sociology of emotion gives a necessary foundation for the concise theory of emotions in the media events and guides the empirical inquiry into the subject by suggesting that research should focus on the arousing rhetoric as well as narratives interpreting this arousal and turning it into the specific emotion. The analyzed media event – political scandal – very well exemplifies the theoretical argument made in regard to media events, demonstrates the power of emotions in establishing particular versions of reality and illustrates what I call the recursive logic of media events: the fact that their meaning is established at the very end of their occurrence, whereas their event-ness is implied at the beginning with the intensive arousal attracting everyone's attention.

Critical Role of Emotions in Media Events

2016 ◽  
pp. 41-58
Author(s):  
Monika Verbalytė
Keyword(s):  
Critical Role ◽  
Theoretical Argument ◽  
Empirical Inquiry ◽  
Media Events ◽  
Specific Emotion ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Sociology Of Emotion ◽  
Media Event

This contribution relates recent theoretizations of media events with the emotion theory in order to get a better picture of what role emotions play in these events. Critical view toward media events helps to understand the limitations of the claims made by those who established this concept 30 years ago: Rather than instances magically integrating society, media events are seen as struggles over the meaning in the contested media field where by far not every winning meaning enhances societal integration. Additionally, psychology and sociology of emotion gives a necessary foundation for the concise theory of emotions in the media events and guides the empirical inquiry into the subject by suggesting that research should focus on the arousing rhetoric as well as narratives interpreting this arousal and turning it into the specific emotion. The analyzed media event – political scandal – very well exemplifies the theoretical argument made in regard to media events, demonstrates the power of emotions in establishing particular versions of reality and illustrates what I call the recursive logic of media events: the fact that their meaning is established at the very end of their occurrence, whereas their event-ness is implied at the beginning with the intensive arousal attracting everyone's attention.

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