scholarly journals From immediate community to imagined community: Social identity and the co-viewing of media event

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-496 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xi Cui ◽  
Jian Rui ◽  
Fanbo Su

This study examines how different types of co-viewing are associated with viewers’ emotional response to the live broadcast of media events and their social identity. A survey ( N = 206) was conducted to examine the effect of the live broadcast of a grand national ceremony in China. Results show that viewers experienced emotional arousal when they watched the media event in physical, mediated, and perceived co-viewing conditions. Among these conditions, mediated co-viewing, operationalized as social media engagement during the event, is the strongest predictor of emotional arousal. Moreover, emotional arousal fully mediates the relationship between co-viewing conditions and viewers’ national identity conveyed in the broadcast ceremony. With empirical evidence, we demonstrate the continued relevance of the genre of media events and the importance of co-viewing experiences in the contemporary media ecology. We argue that this broadcast genre is still effective with regard to social integration, and dual-screening media events could be a new mechanism of this effect.

Author(s):  
Samuel Mateus

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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 1069-1078
Author(s):  
Ya. A. Dudareva ◽  
N. N. Shpilnaya ◽  
T. V. Moskvitina

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.


Author(s):  
Stephen Winkler

AbstractPolitical leaders across Africa frequently accuse the media of promoting homosexuality, while activists often use the media to promote pro-LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) narratives. Despite extensive research on how the media affects public opinion, including studies that show how exposure to certain information can increase support of LGBTQs, there is virtually no research on how the media influences attitudes towards LGBTQs across Africa. This study develops a theory that accounts for actors' mixed approach to the media and shows how different types of media create distinct effects on public opinion of LGBTQs. Specifically, the study finds that radio and television have no, or a negative, significant effect on pro-gay attitudes, whereas individuals who consume more newspapers, internet or social media are significantly more likely to support LGBTQs (by approximately 2 to 4 per cent). The author argues that these differential effects are conditional on censorship of queer representation from certain mediums. The analysis confirms that the results are not driven by selection effects, and that the relationship is unique to LGBTQ support but not other social attitudes. The results have important implications, especially given the growing politicization of same-sex relations and changing media consumption habits across Africa.


Author(s):  
Ryan M. Milner

This book presents an analysis of internet memes, the linguistic, image, audio, and video texts created, circulated, and transformed by countless cultural participants across vast networks and collectives. They can be widely shared catchphrases, auto-tuned songs, manipulated stock photos, or recordings of physical performances. They’re used to make jokes, argue points, and connect friends. As these texts have become increasingly prominent and prolific, the logics underscoring them—multimodality, reappropriation, resonance, collectivism, and spread—have become lynchpins of mediated participation. Even as individual internet memes rise and fall, the contemporary media ecology persists in being memetic. In this ecology, vibrant collective conversations occur across constellations of mediated commentary, remix, and play. Through memetic media, everyday members of the public can contribute their small strands of expression to the vast cultural tapestry. This book assesses the relationship between those small strands and that vast tapestry, exploring the good, the bad, and the in-between of collective conversation. Memetic media are used to connect participants across distance and context, but they’re also used to dehumanize others through the dominant perspectives they normalize. They’re used to express beyond narrow gatekeeping systems, but they’re still embedded in wider culture industries. Memetic media bring with them a mix of new potentials and old tensions, woven into the cultural tapestry by countless contributors. This book charts that intertwine.


Communication ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Sonnevend

“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.


2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Axel Bruns

As the Journal of Media Innovations comes into existence, this article reflects on the first and most obvious question: just what do we mean by “media innovations”? Drawing on the examples of a range of recent innovations in media technologies and practices, initiated by a variety of media audiences, users, professionals, and providers, it explores the interplay between the different drivers of innovation and the effects of such innovation on the complex frameworks of contemporary society and the media ecology which supports it. In doing so, this article makes a number of key observations: first, it notes that media innovation is an innovation in media practices at least as much as in media technologies, and that changes to the practices of media both reflect and promote societal changes as well – media innovations are never just media technology innovations. Second, it shows that the continuing mediatisation of society, and the shift towards a more widespread participation of ordinary users as active content creators and media innovators, make it all the more important to investigate in detail these interlinked, incremental, everyday processes of media and societal change – media innovations are almost always also user innovations. Finally, it suggests that a full understanding of these processes as they unfold across diverse interleaved media spaces and complex societal structures necessarily requires a holistic perspective on media innovations, which considers the contemporary media ecology as a crucial constitutive element of societal structures and seeks to trace the repercussions of innovations across both media and society – media innovations are inextricably interlinked with societal innovations (even if, at times, they may not be considered to be improvements to the status quo).


2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-57
Author(s):  
Peter Zuurbier

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.


Author(s):  
Christian Morgner

This article focuses on the growing importance of large-scale events and their central role in a globalised media world in relation to public reactions and public involvement. The peculiar structure of such events requires a different understanding of mass communication and its audience. Therefore, the audience is further examined with regard to its impact on and inclusion in the media itself. Consequently, questions are raised as to how the public is incorporated, the form this inclusion takes and the effect that this has on the audience&rsquo;s participation.<br />The article examines different types of semantic inclusion, with a focus on emotional reactions towards three different media events: the Titanic disaster, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the death of Princess Diana.<br />


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Sumiala ◽  
Minttu Tikka ◽  
Katja Valaskivi

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.


2020 ◽  
pp. 136787792096810
Author(s):  
Joke Hermes ◽  
Annette Hill

This is the introduction to a special issue on media and transgression, one of early cultural studies’ key terms. It inquires into the uses of transgression as a critical concept to query contemporary media culture which is discussed in six case studies: on political satire, Mukbang, cult drama, the policing of film piracy, media scandals, and online trolls. Transgression points to the energy that fuels the media ecology – from content and content production to audience practices and the policing of content ownership. It is the (conscious) overstepping of moral and legal boundaries, that challenges written and unwritten rules. The frisson of rule breaking and the reward of rule re-establishment (whether by powerful parties or everyday gossip) are transgression’s bookends. Together they support the cyclical rhythm of media culture that maintains not just our interest as viewers but our interests and connectedness as citizens, whether in celebration, outrage or condemnation.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document