Contemporary ceremonial media events – time and temporalities of liveness

Since 1958, the Danish monarch has addressed the Danish people live on television on New Year's Eve. The speech was initially broadcast on television and radio, and since 2010, it has also been transmitted on the Danish public broadcasting services’ web portals. Since Queen Margrethe II made her first speech in 1972, the New Year's speech has mainly been transmitted from the queen's official reception room at the royal palace, Amalienborg, in Copenhagen. It starts precisely at 18:00 after sequences of exterior shots showing the queen's guards saluting and the gathering of people following the speech on screens on the palace square. The ceremonial tone is set by six strokes from the Town Hall clock. The speech lasts between 11 and 13 minutes; however, around 2005, DR (The Danish Broadcasting Corporation) started expanding the before sequence by framing the speech within a sociable conversation between a group of guests, journalists, and experts, seated at a table in front of the palace. They are all dressed up and sipping champagne, thus mimicking what is most likely taking place in front of most screens in Danish homes at that same moment. The chat leads up to the speech by contemplating what the queen might address that year, thereby increasing expectations as well as festivity and presence. In the after phase of the event, the same group of guests evaluate the speech amiably.

The live New Year's Eve speech is a national ritual attended by a large portion of the Danish population. The annual average attendance is 2.2 million viewers, and the speech on New Year's Eve 2020 attracted almost 3 million viewers, more than half the population (MediaWatch, 2021). The form is ceremonial and festive, and the queen's friendly smile and direct look into the camera infuse her communication with a sense of presence and intimacy. She sits behind her desk, decorated with some personal items (often from Greenland and the Faroe Islands) and a colourful bouquet of flowers, and she reads from the script in her hand while addressing the viewers directly. The open door to a cozy and elegant dimly lit sitting room behind her contributes to creating what Dayan and Katz (1992: 216) would call a “communal and egalitarian experience”, placing her almost on equal footing with the viewers during the event. She is dressed nicely, but never as if she was going to a party after the speech. The queen is at work, performing one of her royal duties, so she also maintains a certain distance.

The transmission is minutely planned. It is hegemonic and resonates historically. It is also integrative and creates a national “we” in which the queen includes herself and her family – in 2020, by making reference to her youngest son's (much media-covered) sickness and recovery. Time is of course prominent in the New Year's speech, just as New Year's Eve is a celebratory counting down to the new year. Like the televised transmission of the queen's speech, New Year's Eve typically constructs a festive and condensed – thickened – temporality, in which the present moment includes the past year and the year to come.

The queen's annual speech enacts and confirms the sovereign's traditional authority (as phrased by Max Weber; see Dayan & Katz, 1992: 43–45). The media event resembles Dayan and Katz's understanding of coronations. However, the construction of familiarity is prominent. The viewing situation is different, and the construction of the event's temporality of liveness includes the viewers in a more proximate, including way. The convivial framing and the direct address make the festive viewers co-constituents in the unfolding of the event rather than witnesses or an audience being “reached” by the event – to refer to Hepp and Couldry's (2010: 12) definition of the media event. This became manifest in the queen's 2020 speech. She concluded with the ritual blessing “Gud bevare Danmark!”, or “God bless Denmark!” but, surprisingly, before that she said “Gud bevare jer allesammen”, or “God bless you all”. This sociable and informal closing address created a bond between the queen and the viewers: It constructed a temporality of presence and a national collectivity, while at the same time referring to the challenging Covid-19 year, which the speech addressed at the beginning (see also Villadsen, 2021). Finally, it intensified the liveness, which constituted this television broadcast as a shared experience and an integrative national media event.

However, the informally spoken blessing and direct personal address might be regarded as this television event calling attention to its cross-media context, that the speech would be posted online on Instagram. Whereas the Danish crown prince and crown princess occasionally post information on Instagram accompanied by a personal comment – for example, a close-up of the crown prince at a hairdresser's along with the comment “I am possibly not the only one having a haircut today” (The Danish Royal House, 2020), and the crown princess posting a selfie on a plane on her way to an event with her “husband” (Crown Princess Mary of Denmark, 2021) – all photographs of the queen on Instagram (and Facebook) are posted with informative third-person comments. The informal blessing may thus compensate for the queen's lack of personal communication on Instagram.

The live broadcast of the queen's speech enacted traditional authority. In contrast, the ceremonial form of the media event constituted by the Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen's live transmitted press conference and speech on 11 March 2020 accorded with Weber's rational-legal authority, in which power resides in the political system and the “criteria of achievement that give access to leadership in such a system” (Dayan & Katz, 1992: 43–44). The live transmitted press conference occurred at the time when the Covid-19 pandemic was spreading aggressively; accordingly, it was the Covid-19 speech in which the prime minister declared a comprehensive lockdown.

The speech started at 20:30 and gathered the Danes massively in front of their screens; it had a little more than 1.8 million viewers.

Of the eight Covid-19 press conferences Mette Frederiksen headed between 6 March and 6 April 2020, viewer attendance at the first conference was only a little less than a quarter of a million, and attendance declined after the 11 March conference (PHD, 2020). The prime minister's 17 March press conference forecasting further restrictions was attended by approximately 2.85 million viewers, though this was most likely because Queen Margrethe II gave a historical Covid-19 speech immediately after that was attended by an unprecedented 3.4 million viewers. Numbers include flow TV on DR, TV2 and TV2 News, but exclude users on digital platforms (Dr.dk and TV2 Play).

The Hall of Mirrors is one of the official rooms in the Prime Minister's Department, where press briefings take place on a weekly basis. However, they have not usually been transmitted to the public. The room is ceremonial. It is renovated in a neobaroque style, and a grey monochrome wall-to-wall carpet covers the floor. The walls are blue-grey, and a large blue banner bearing the Prime Minister Department's logo fills the walls behind the white desks where the officials would stand.

At exactly 20:30, the doors to the large room opened and a long shot showed the grave-looking procession entering. The prime minster walked ahead and placed herself by the middle table, flanked by the director of the Danish Health Authority, the minister of health and the elderly, the police commissioner, and the director of citizen services at the Foreign Ministry. They were all formally dressed, the prime minister wearing a dark skirt and jacket, the police commissioner in uniform, and the three other men in dark suits and ties. After the prime minister's extended introduction in which she explained the imminent implementation of restrictions and regulations, she gave the floor to her surrounding officials, and finally the camera turned towards a smaller group of journalists who were invited to ask a couple of questions. The after phase returned to the news studio and a continued discussion among the experts from the before phase.

Mette Frederiksen's press conference explicitly unfolded as a local media event, the Danes being at the centre of attention despite the global nature of the pandemic. The prime minister repeatedly appealed to “Danishness” and used the inclusive “we” pronoun. It framed “the COVID-19 crisis as a uniquely Danish problem with a particularly Danish solution” (Villadsen, 2020: 230), that is, showing “samfundssind” (translated by Villadsen as “civic-mindedness”) because, as phrased by the prime minister, “this is exactly what we have in Denmark”. Thus, the rhetorical maneuvers of the speech served to create the integrative communitas, which the live ceremonial event is meant to deliver, according to Dayan and Katz. Central to the speech was an emphasis on how the impending changes to everyday life would be challenging. Whereas the broadcast event in Dayan and Katz's view “creates an upsurge of fellow feeling, an epidemic of communitas [emphasis original]” (1992: 196), the speech was urging this communitas to stand together and “help each other”. The obvious crack in the communitas – the fact that the Covid-19 virus spread so rapidly that “we have started to also infect each other here in Denmark” – was amended rhetorically by constructing the slogan, “Standing together by keeping a distance”. The press conference simultaneously advocated and created this national (imagined) community.

For a discussion of the speech's nationalism and how the interpellated community of Danes excluded other Danes, see Villadsen (2021).

Whereas the queen's speech created a temporality of presence embedded in tradition, the prime minister's live speech created a temporality of urgency. Simultaneously, she called upon and constituted the immediate now for the sake of the future. By deictically invoking the live moment (“What I am going to say to you tonight will have great consequences for all Danes”), she performed the speech as an extraordinary prolonged now, even though the set-up repeated the previous day's press conference.

The prime minister managed to craft a national media event, broadcast live and interrupting the scheduled flow of the two national channels. The speech was focused on the necessity of acting immediately to prevent a future catastrophe. The press conference was ceremonial while at the same time exuding an air of future disruptions by the DR reporter's reference to 9/11. It was far from festive, but invoked everyday social life and presaged a different everyday temporality. The speech brought together a community of Danes, and the event enacted one of the core functions of the media event: It was “integrative of society” (Dayan & Katz, 1992; Katz & Liebes, 2007) in terms of media attendance, the exceptional live transmission of an extraordinary moment and the serious mood, mirrored in the authoritative mise-en-scène. Additionally, the speech's rhetorical construction of a temporality of urgency and its rhetorical inclusion of the audience contributed to the ceremonial construction of a national community.

The speech confirmed the prime minister's rational-legal authority while at the same time challenging the broadcaster's position as “mediated centre” (Couldry, 2003) by relegating it to a slightly inferior position: DR produced and were in charge of the before and after phases but transmitted the during phase – whose content the producer and anchor were not fully aware of. In this article's third example, the 2021 American presidential inauguration, while emphasising liveness and real time and accomplishing the ceremonial media event, the construction of television as mediated centre was no less challenged.

Joe Biden was officially sworn in as president on 20 January 2021. The inauguration was broadcast and live-streamed on all major American network and cable media. An estimated 34 million Americans watched the extended transmission, which started the sequence of anticipation well before the ceremony on the historically important Capitol. Joe Biden was sworn in around noon, Vice President Kamala Harris shortly before, and the transmission lasted until President Biden and his wife arrived at the White House at around 16:00.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, there was no “mass audience” co-producing the coronation and confirming “the contract between leaders and led” (Dayan & Katz, 1992: 42). Apart from this important difference, the ceremony on the Capitol and the post-ceremonial events (the visit by the new and former presidents and their spouses to the Arlington cemetary, for example) comply with Dayan and Katz's definition of the coronation, the function of which is “to reaffirm the values at the center” (Dayan & Katz, 1992: 42). However, unlike Dayan and Katz's argument that the coronation constructs a “time orientation” towards the past (1992: 34–35), the inauguration event constructed a temporality of futurity. The theme of Biden's inaugural speech was the soon-to-come recovery of “American unity” (The White House, 2021), and the inauguration was staged as a future-oriented occasion to reaffirm a collective sense of American history for the future (Heikka et al., 2016). The event was also spectacular. Singers Garth Brooks, Lady Gaga, and Jennifer Lopez and poet Amanda Gorman contributed prominently, the latter three glamorously dressed, thus also embedding the temporality of futurity within a fashionable now. The singers performed nationally revered treasures, and their appearance represented a spectacular and festive contrast to the practical and winterly look of the invited guests and the facemasks worn by everyone. Notwithstanding Lady Gaga's performance of the national anthem and Amanda Gorman's rendition of her poem “The Hill We Climb”, the fashion media were quick to comment on Gaga's voluminous haute couture Shiaparelli gown, Gorman's bright yellow Prada coat and red headband, and Michelle Obama's purple outfit by Sergio. Gaga and Gorman quickly took to social media, though, to explain the symbolic value of their outfits, thus balancing the fashionable and the nowness of the fashion with the reverential in the media event.

However, a user-generated media event eventually became attached to the ritualised and reverential ceremonial media event. A couple of photos of independent senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, long-time fierce critic of social and economic inequality in the US and earlier front-runner for the nomination as Democratic presidential candidate, became memes and went viral on social media right before the inauguration ended. The ceremonial and reverential mood was overlaid with a disruptive commenting on the coronation through humorous, satirising mocking. I use the term disruption in a different way than Katz and Liebes (2007), who use it to designate sudden and unexpected, often violent, events. I also do not use it to mean hijacked media events, where protesters or terrorists appropriate the ceremonial scene for disruptive means (Dayan & Katz, 1992: 72–73; Sonnevend, 2018; Heikka et al., 2016). Instead, I use it to designate how the satirical communication dismantled the aura of the inauguration.

The Sanders memes were the result of a process of visual decontextualisation. They deritualised the media event by creating another free-floating online space, punctuating its temporality of futurity in favour of a temporality of compressed immediacy characteristic of the viral – a nowness attending to neither the past nor the future. Moreover, as the memes spread to many corners of social medias’ networked publics, they disrupted the sense of the event as a powerful political centre to which authority could be attached. Finally, the memes despectacularised the event by spreading an image of an old man wearing a plain winter coat and a pair of over-sized knitted mittens. In short, by humorously elevating Sanders's homely appearance, the spreading of the memes created a user-generated media event which deceremonialised the official mediated event and thus mocked the elite by zooming in on a random moment before the ceremony started.

The capture and decontextualisation of this moment definitely went viral. Between 20 and 23 January, 52,010 tweets including the hashtag #bernie were published on Twitter.

The tweets were generously collected by my colleague, assistant professor Franziska Marquart, using R and the academictwitteR package (Barrie & Ho, 2021), utilising Twitter's v2 API endpoint for academic researchers (Tornes & Trujillo, 2021). In all likelihood, not all of these tweets were memes.

Memes are basically defined as mutable and replicable “semiotic signs”, “mediated digital content which individuals can alter if they choose and spread again” (Wiggins, 2019: 6, 44). They are “units of popular culture that are circulated, imitated, and transformed by individual Internet users, creating a shared cultural experience in the process” (Shifman, 2013: 367; see also Shifman, 2014, for a slightly different definition). Accordingly, memes work by being detached from their original context, but they only go viral because of joint knowledge to their references. Miltner (2018) credits Jean Burgess (2006) with the term “vernacular creativity” when defining memes, which makes sense in this context, where the strategy of many of the Sanders memes is humorous devaluation. Finally, Denisova (2019: 2) contributes to the understanding of the “viral power” of memes by focusing on emotion. Memes are “remarkably versatile for meaning-making, emotion-sharing and attention-grabbing in the oversaturated Internet environment” (Denisova, 2019: 10).

The most memified photograph, taken by photojournalist Brendan Smialowski, shows Sanders “appearing unamused” (Fazio, 2021), bundled up in a chair in his ordinary green parka, wearing a blue facemask, his legs and arms crossed, his eyes slightly closed behind his glasses. Most conspicuously, he is wearing a pair of large, knitted mittens in a brown and white pattern. However, another meme grabbed from television broadcasts, which apparently started circulating on Twitter a little before the one using Smialowski's photo, may have set the tone of vernacular mocking of the elite: It showed Sanders on the Capitol holding an orange Manila Envelope and looking “like he was just running an everyday errand” (Wanshel, 2021). Apparently, the envelope contained the ticket to the event; however, it occasioned different deceremonialising memes, which communicated referentially (Shifman, 2013) by adding texts commenting on his everyday appearance: “Bernie really looks like he's on his way to mail something” (Katherine Miller, 2021); “Bernie, on his way to Stewarts for coffee, has parked his Subaru on the capitol lawn to briefly attend the inauguration” (Taietsarón:sere, 2021); “Bernie dressed like the inauguration is on his to do list today but ain’t his whole day” (Reeezy, 2021); or “10:30, drop off dry cleaning; 11:00, Joe's thing; 2:00 swing by the post office” (Brody Logan, 2021).

The mitten memes can be divided in two main categories distinguished by their different decontextualisation: one adds humor to the photograph through comments, while the other does so through remixing (Wiggins, 2019), inserting Sanders in new, popular cultural, or real-world, contexts (some of these memes also include text). Texts accompanying the former anchor Bernie Sanders's pose humorously – in the manner of friendly mocking – like “In Jewish yoga this pose is: waiting for my wife at Loehmann's” (Chandra Steele, 2021); “I am once again asking that you not talk to me at parties” (Obed Manuel, 2021); or “Bernie Sanders gets to the movie theater nice and early even though he hates sitting through the trailers” (Joseph Scrimshaw, 2021). The remixed memes insert Sanders in numerous different environments, be they geographical locations in the US or well-known popular cultural texts. Examples include Bernie Sanders on a bench with Tom Hanks in Forest Gump (e.g., Torres, 2021); Bernie Sanders in the coffee shop in Friends (e.g., Myllena <3, n.d.); Bernie Sanders in Hopper's Nighthawks (e.g., Golenda & Waddoups, 2021); Bernie Sanders together with the workers having “Lunch on top a Skyscraper” (e.g., Know Your Meme, n.d.); Bernie Sanders on the moon (e.g., Alex Levin, n.d.); Bernie Sanders sitting alone in an underground car (e.g., Ives & Victor, 2021); and Bernie Sanders anywhere in a Google Street View Image (e.g., Desreumaux, 2021).

According to Wired (Barrett, 2021: para. 7), master candidate in computer science Nick Sawhney quickly set up a site which offered users the opportunity to put “pictures of Sanders anywhere in the world that Google's Street View cars have roamed”.

Through decontextualisation and “playful appropriations of contexts” (Mortensen & Neumayer, 2021), a user-generated media event using memes to mock the reverential temporality of futurity and the performance of power in the inauguration ceremony developed rapidly on social media. The user-generated media event departed from and interacted with the coronation, commented upon it, and called upon a debate about its undisputed staging of the powerful nation and its authority. In the aftermath of the inauguration, the memes challenged the ceremonial event and could be said to transform it into an alternative “dialogic” event (Heikka et al., 2016).