In today’s media saturated environment, the battle for attention is more intensive than ever. Still, some events stand out and gather attention and momentum on a greater scale, for example large-scale sports events, presidential inaugurations, state funerals, the Eurovision Song Contest, major terrorist attacks, and natural disasters.
Media events is a recurring concept that points to both continuities and changes in our media landscape. Revisiting this concept constitutes a focal point for analysis of the complex role of media in a highly globalised and networked society. Dayan and Katz’s seminal study Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (1992) provided a first, important framework for understanding the media’s construction of key historical events. This book concerned the ability of broadcast media to create ritual events that break with the routines of everyday life, unite audiences, and form shared frames of reference. Dayan and Katz foregrounded the integrative function of the media and focused primarily on celebratory events.
In the intervening years, scholars have critically examined the media and the events involved in media events. The first criticism was directed at Dayan and Katz’s notion of events, which was challenged from the outset for being too narrow. Researchers broadened the analysis of media events to include conflictual events such as scandals, acts of violence, terror attacks, natural disasters, and so on. Most recently, the growing importance of networked media has prompted scholars to examine the new conditions and dynamics for the production and reception of media events. These contributions have expanded what we can think of as media events.
Within other strands of research, scholars have pointed to events as increasingly significant communicative tools for a wide range of societal agents to attract attention in a networked, connective media landscape. Extraordinary large-scale cultural events, aimed at global audiences, have been characterised as mega events and described as increasingly powerful interfaces between economic, cultural, and political interests. In these processes, media are considered absolutely pivotal, serving as crucial communicative engines of exposure, promotion, and attention. However, it remains unclear how this role is performed: Audiences are more fragmented than ever and navigate between platforms that not only operate with many different time structures, but are also based on datafied processes and logics of connectivity and popularity. Moreover, global connectivities also reconfigure the relationship between the global and local – for example, Nordic.
Taken together, these more recent contributions and trends have expanded what we can think of as media events. But they also raise the question of how far and wide the concept might be stretched before losing its critical edge – and perhaps even its meaning.
In general, the 2022 volume of Nordic Journal of Media Studies focuses on the technological, commercial, social, cultural, and political dynamics shaping current media events in today’s connective media landscape distinguished by blurred boundaries between media production and consumption. We are specifically interested in the role of social media in the construction of current media events, but also welcome analyses with other perspectives on the digital condition, including for instance the increasingly complex interplay between media in current media events. This may also include analyses of the disruption of media events caused by crises such as Covid-19, which might shed new light on important aspects of media events.
This volume seeks contributions that further the theoretical, empirical, and methodological approaches to understanding and studying media events. Subjects include, but are not limited to, the following:
- The algorithmic and commercial underpinnings of media events
- Media events and the construction of the spectacular
- Social media and the construction and production of mega events
- Media events and eventification – conceptual challenges?
- Eventification as a marketing strategy Eventification and everyday life Audience experiences and strategies
- The configuration of time and place in media events
- Media events between the singular and the repetitive Covid-19, de-eventification, and emergence of new communicative events
- The Internet, media events, and globalisation
- Media events from a Nordic perspective
- The media dynamics of political scandals and terrorist attacks
- Media events and mediatised rituals – integrative and disruptive functions
Please submit proposals of 500 words to the editors of this themed issue:
Kirsten Frandsen (imvkf@cc.au.dk), Anne Jerslev (jerslev@hum.ku.dk), Mette Mortensen (metmort@hum.ku.dk).
A selection of authors will be invited to submit full papers (maximum 8,000 words). Please note that acceptance of an abstract does not guarantee publication, given that all papers will undergo double-blind peer review. For questions, please contact the editors of this theme issue.
Timetable
Deadline for abstracts: 15 February 2021
Notification to authors: 1 March 2021
Deadline for submission of full papers: 1 August 2021
Peer-review process: 1 August–15 October 2021
Submission of final manuscript: 1 January 2022
Publication of special issue: spring/summer 2022
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