Volume 4 (2022): Issue 1 (June 2022)
Media Events in the Age of Global, Digital Media

This article discusses media events and liveness as ways live is performed in and by the media. Understanding the workings of contemporary media events entails understanding how they are embedded in complex patterns of temporalities; hence, the article deploys the notion of temporality of liveness to contemplate different ways in which time is entangled and made salient as particular forms of temporality in the unfolding of media events. Analysing the Danish queen's 2020 New Year's speech, the Danish prime minister's Covid-19 speech of 11 March 2020, and the broadcasting of the inauguration of Joe Biden on 20 January 2021, the article shows that liveness can be approached analytically. The analysis unfolds the diversity and changeability of temporalities of liveness, and argues that contemporary ceremonial events may be local or global, small or large, but still reach a substantial portion of a population. Thus, a point in the article is to call attention to the enduring importance of broadcast media and television for the creation of media events that gather and “enthrall” large audiences, to quote Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, even in a time of global digital network communication.

When Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz published their seminal book Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History in 1992, television occupied centre stage, whereas computer networks were only beginning to be used. Since the late 1990s, television and digital media have co-existed and co-evolved in still more entangled ways. In this article, I ask how the supplementing of television by a new media form, the Web, has affected the ways media events as understood by Dayan and Katz can unfold and be conceptualised. Based on a medium theory perspective where focus is more on “media” and less on “event”, I introduce the article by tracing how Dayan and Katz understand television as a medium. Then follows a brief account of the vast literature about Media Events, with a particular focus on how digital media are conceptualised. With these two sections as a stepping stone, the Web's digital features are outlined, followed by a historical analysis of the interplay of the development of the Web and a concrete media event: the Olympics from 1996 to 2016. Finally, this web historical outline is used to re-evaluate Dayan and Katz's conceptualisation of media events. The analysis is guided by three themes – liveness, control, and participation – pivotal for Dayan and Katz's understanding of media events as well as the history of the Web.

Online networks have blurred the lines between national and global news, and have given users a more active role in how information flows. This opens up the opportunity for individuals to engage with foreign events in new ways, curating information and offering their own interpretations. In this article, we investigate how national elections are taken up in the global Twittersphere, using a set of 198,635 English-language tweets about the 2018 Swedish parliamentary election. Based on a network analysis and a content analysis of themes in the tweets, we demonstrate that national media events can become “deterritorialised” by globally networked publics. A second key finding is that the Swedish election is leveraged to discuss anti-globalist themes such as immigration and nationalism in, paradoxically, a global and deterritorialised context.

The updating of media event theory for the digital age has been underway for some time, and several researchers have pointed out that the complexity of the hybrid media environment poses a challenge when it comes to understanding how media events in the present digital context ritually create belonging. In this article, we examine violent media events as hybrid phenomena and discuss their ritual workings in the present digital media environment. We apply what we call the 5 A’s – actors, affordances, attention, affect, and acceleration – as key analytical tools to empirically study such events. We also develop the concept of hybridity in relation to media events by proposing three auxiliary A’s: assemblage, amplification, and accumulation. Building on our earlier work, we call for more analytical consideration of the ambivalences in the ritual constructions of belonging (and non-belonging) in such violent events. We use the Christchurch massacre of 2019 as a case study to illustrate these conceptual developments.

Media events, Dayan and Katz argue, compose a narrative genre that follows specific structural principles and narrative tropes and that works toward societal integration. However, a specific subset of media events is labelled transformative, and these work towards societal change. In this article, we point to an unresolved tension between transformative events and what has subsequently been introduced as disruptive events. Our discussion builds on research on the developments in post-Soviet Ukraine, and we analyse, firstly, the transformative and disruptive relations related to the so-called Euromaidan Revolution, and secondly, how these events can be placed in a wider narrative of three Ukrainian revolutions. Our analysis concludes that narrative analysis can help explain the ways in which these events are understood by broader international audiences.

I have just learnt that Elihu Katz – a dearly loved friend and colleague – has died at the age of 95. This abstract is a valediction forbidding mourning. Media Events, written with Daniel Dayan, was the culminating work of a career spanning six decades – a career launched by Personal Influence, written with his doctoral supervisor, Professor Paul Lazarsfeld, of Columbia University, New York, and published in 1955. In my contribution to this issue, I try to do two things: firstly, to indicate how Media Events opened up a novel way of thinking about television and, at the same time, to think of it as a summa, the distillation of a lifetime’s work in the academic field of communication and media studies. I wanted especially to point towards its stimmung – that untranslatable ordinary German word for mood, or disposition: an attitude to life, the world, and television. I start with Katz’s earliest academic work – his master’s thesis completed at Columbia in the 1940s, felicitously but not accidentally called The Happiness Game. The stimmung of this work is the same as that of Media Events. That vision, as Daniel Dayan has claimed, was not a mirage. What he and Katz saw in La Télévision Céremoniélle (the book’s French title when he translated it) was every bit as true as the dominant academic view of the politics of television whose hegemonic sociological take on “the real world” they both attempted to counter.