The most intense hopes and fears of our collective lives centre around large-scale events – from competitions, celebrations and festivals to environmental disasters, pandemics and terror attacks. The media are a crucial part of this process: they enable the planning, resource allocation and circulation of the vital information needed to mount major events. They are also where traces of events are stored for history. In short, large-scale and collective events have been, and still are, mediated.
Starting from nineteenth-century industrialisation, Media and Events in History explains how contemporary life has become saturated with events. It discusses how they have come to involve extensive infrastructures, forms of control and anticipation, attention and participation, contingency and transformation, and articulations of the past and the future. Synthesising and developing insights from history, media studies, philosophy and the social sciences, Ytreberg surveys the rise of event-planning via mediation, and exposes the historical driving forces behind ‘media events’, global ‘mega-events’ and ‘pseudo-events’.
Revealing the importance of events in history, this eye-opening book will be of interest to students of media studies, history, historical sociology and cultural history, as well as the general reader.
Table of Content
Acknowledgements
Part 1: Concepts and theories
Chapter 1 Understanding large-scale events
Chapter 2 Trans-ports: Key concepts for large-scale events
Chapter 3 Return of the event in history, media critique and media studies
Part 2: Cases and histories
Chapter 4 Planned events
Chapter 5 Media-planned events
Chapter 6 Nonplanned events
Conclusion: The challenges and limits of events
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Espen Ytreberg is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Oslo.
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