Non-representational news: An intervention into pseudo-events

Pseudo-events and simulations

Political actors routinely take advantage of the slippage between phenomena and communication by constructing phenomena that appear spontaneous in their representation while having been carefully scripted and painstakingly performed. This practice is captured in the 20th-century concept of the ‘pseudo-event’ introduced by Boorstin (1987 [1961]: vii), who wrote, ‘I do not know what “reality” is. But somehow I do know an illusion when I see one’. Boorstin identifies four characteristics of a pseudo-news event: it is (1) planned, not spontaneous; (2) ‘arranged for the convenience of the reporting or reproducing media’ (p. 11); (3) ambiguously related to any underlying reality; and (4) ‘intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy’ (p. 12). Boorstin’s example is a flagging hotel that hires a public relations firm to contrive an anniversary event organized by prominent townspeople. The event is planned and covered, it exists only because it was planned to be covered, and it creates prestige by enacting prestige. For our example, we can take Mike Pence and the hot-dog bun. Pence’s viewing was scheduled by his press handlers, strictly for the purpose of being photographed and disseminated in the news. Its connection with campaign issues or the problems vexing Americans was tenuous. And it was designed to create the illusion that Pence was a Trump admirer through the image of Pence admiring a Trump artifact.

Presidential-level pseudo-events are among the most commonly identified by press critics. Boorstin (1987 [1961]) named Franklin Roosevelt as a pioneer of the pseudo-event and the modern press conference. Bennett (2003) recalled Richard Nixon being depicted visiting a pristine California beach after an oil spill in Santa Barbara; the beach was clean because it wasn’t the site of the spill. ‘In other words, the public was shown a real beach but it was not shown the real problem’ (Bennett, 2003: 142). Likewise, Bagdikian (1992) complained about news media acquiescence to banal photo opportunities of Ronald Reagan that represented the president as cheerfully competent without requiring him to account for anything.

The pseudo-event trap is a function of standard news values: good visuals of a prominent, powerful, and popular politician, satisfying the incessant need for breaking news, even if the news is simply the president striding across a tarmac. News workers, under constant pressure to fill space and time, are putty in the hands of clever pseudo-event creators and often do their bidding without regard for the social consequences. As Boorstin (1987 [1961]) wrote of reporters’ relationship with the communist-hunting pseudo-event master Joseph McCarthy, ‘Many hated him; all helped him’ (p. 22). This observation, of course, predates Trump’s perfection of the Twitter-based pseudo-event and the campaign rally structured to require news organizations to accurately report untruths about their own veracity. Boorstin, in the mid-20th century, made a clear distinction between pseudo-events and propaganda – ‘While a pseudo-event is an ambiguous truth, propaganda is an appealing falsehood’ (p. 34) – but in the current ‘postfactual’ era (Bybee, 1999; Godler and Reich, 2017), this distinction has weakened (see Beutler, 2017).

Boorstin described the pseudo-event in language strikingly similar to Baudrillard’s (1983) description of simulacra and simulations. From Boorstin (1987 [1961]),

We begin to be puzzled about what is really the ‘original’ of an event. The authentic news record of what ‘happens’ or is said comes increasingly to seem to be what is given out in advance. … The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. (pp. 19, 37)

And here’s Baudrillard (1983):

The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory … All media and the official news service only exist to maintain the illusion of actuality – of the reality of the stakes, of the objectivity of the facts. (pp. 2, 71)

Baudrillard (1983), however, went a step further, arguing not only that pseudo-events or simulations are so seductive as to overshadow actual events, but also that we have erased any meaningful difference:

[I]t is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real. Thus all hold-ups, hijacks and the like are now as it were simulation hold-ups, in the sense that they are inscribed in advance in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media … (p. 41)

Baudrillard offered the example of Disneyland, which ‘is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country … Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real’ (p. 25).

To synthesize Baudrillard and Boorstin through these examples, the media, ever seeking to meet our expectations for the extraordinary, can now both produce and fulfill our expectations in a loop that requires nothing from us. Bennett (2003), in his critique of political news, wrote,

[S]tories seldom contain much information beyond that provided by politicians and resource-rich interest organizations. These dominant news sources routinely rely on market research to package their messages in terms that targeted publics already have in mind – raising questions about how often the news is likely to stimulate learning or helpful democratic deliberation. (p. 8, emphasis added)

We have witnessed the results of the lulling effects of political news that adheres to the agendas and schedules of politicians and their operatives. There is little about contemporary politics, at least in the United States, that could be deemed healthy or productive. We have little to lose by trying new approaches to public affairs coverage. I propose one such approach below.

Non-representational theory

A key feature of the pseudo-event is that it must be represented to become reality. The un-represented pseudo-event is like the tree that falls in a witness-free forest; it might as well not have happened. Reporters who cover contrived political appearances thus co-create the events with the planners and participants (Fowler, 1991); they become not neutral observers but willing partners in the illusion. Due to the dependence of pseudo-events on representation, an intriguing way to intervene is to consult the realm of non-representational theory (NRT).

NRT – or non-representational theories, or, usefully for this study, more-than-representational theory (Lorimer, 2005) – is an approach to research that is more immanent, more personal, more experientially oriented, and more future-directed than most traditional academic scholarship. Originating in cultural geography (e.g. Dewsbury, 2010; Geoghegan and Woodyer, 2014; Lorimer, 2008; Thrift, 2008), applied in education (e.g. Fendler, 2016; Zembylas, 2016), and recently introduced in journalism and science communication (Parks, 2017), NRT incorporates elements of the performing arts and a variety of post-structural and post-modern ontologies and epistemologies (Vannini, 2015) to pay close attention to the pantheon of influences occurring right now that affect and make possible what will happen next. It is concerned, primarily, with bodies in spaces and the affective impulses on those bodies. NRT erases any ‘categorical or epistemological distinction between signs, symbols, referents and realities’ as well as ‘distinctions among pictures, models, displays or depictions and reality’ (Fendler and Smeyers, 2015: 692). Its essence is not representation, but presentation (Fendler and Smeyers, 2015). Non-representational theorists see elements of non-representational style in many areas of inquiry that do not necessarily claim the NRT mantle, including actor–network theory, neomaterialism, post-structuralist feminism, critical theory, and pragmatism (Vannini, 2015). It is an approach that straddles paradigms by ‘pull[ing] the energy of the performing arts into the social sciences’ (Thrift, 2008: 12). These diverse influences are united under NRT by ‘a sense of affirmation and experimentation’ (Anderson and Harrison, 2010: 2) – that is, experimentation in the sense of constantly trying things out.

NRT is an intrinsically joyful approach to research and a style of observation that can be applied to journalistic reporting. It ‘tries to be restless and willfully immature’ (Vannini, 2015: 5). It is an antidote to the cynical manipulations that underlie public affairs. Geoghegan and Woodyer (2014: 219), following Thrift (2008) in writing against ‘disenchantment’ in scholarly research, ask, ‘How can we embrace and nurture a child-like enthusiasm for the world, and how can we encourage others within and beyond our sub-disciplinary audiences to turn up the color and tune in?’ They answer that ‘we need to challenge the extant habits of critical thinking’ which ‘aim to negate the possibility of surprise’ (p. 224). Rather than being taken in by pseudo-events and propaganda, or unreflexively imbuing them with irresistible manipulative powers, NRT offers tools to usurp them with vividness and wide-eyed attention that takes into account much broader inputs and influences than are traditionally considered politically relevant in newsgathering.

For the purposes of this study, three aspects of NRT are particularly salient. They are affect, immanence, and the disabling of ‘autopilot’, discussed below.

Method and findings

I performed my non-representational journalistic intervention at a fall 2016 campaign rally for Hillary Clinton featuring her chief primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders, in a field on the campus of a Midwestern university. Sanders had been touring to promote Clinton’s campaign with a goal of recreating the energy he had summoned among young voters during the Democratic primary. The rally had been announced in the press and across social media, and participants were encouraged to RSVP. Conceptually, the rally met Boorstin’s (1987 [1961]) criteria for a pseudo-event: it was planned in advance; it was organized and staged for maximum journalistic accessibility; it bore no referent beyond its existence as an event to promote Clinton; and it aimed to fulfill its own prophecy – to generate enthusiasm for Clinton’s campaign by producing and disseminating images of enthusiasm for Clinton’s campaign.

One could argue that such an event, despite meeting Boorstin’s criteria, offered more intrinsic news value than the Pence hot-dog episode because Sanders would espouse campaign rhetoric that might nominally inform voters. It could also be argued that each event performed a specific campaign function necessary for making political evaluations: The Sanders rally spoke to policy, and the Pence event to character. But neither policy nor character is well revealed through traditional coverage in which the semiotic train is driven by political handlers, with the ensuing messages tightly scripted and responses preordained. My objective at the Sanders event was to present sounds and images via a live Twitter feed (#NRT_Sanders), but to puncture the simulacrumatic aspects of the predetermined content by turning off the autopilot of my journalistic training and seeking inputs from the broader plane of immanence to expand the universe of politically relevant experiences. What follows is a rough chronology of what I did before, during, and after the rally, and why I did it.

About an hour and a half before the event, I walked to the designated field, which was cordoned off in roughly the shape and size of a baseball field by slender lines of waist-high black straps, guarded by volunteers who insisted that people text to a campaign phone number to confirm their attendance or, if they were just passing through, to walk around the nearly empty space rather than intrude upon it. A stage was set up at the far end of the field, faced by a grandstand for credentialed press. A warm-up band played upbeat rock music for a few dozen early arrivals. Aside from the volunteers and the cordons, the atmosphere resembled a small-scale student event where one might sign up for a club and receive a free water bottle. On my end, in the ‘outfield’ away from the stage, a vendor sat behind tables of campaign swag and chatted idly with scattered arrivals. On the sidewalk behind me, a sandwich-board wearing supporter of Green Party candidate Jill Stein paced, periodically hollering, ‘Show us what DemExit looks like! This is what DemExit looks like!’ and issuing taunts contrasting the meager pre-rally crowds with the thousands who had assembled on the same campus for Sanders months earlier.

My process as one of the first intentionally non-representational campaign reporters was to survey the scene for the commonsense, natural journalistic shots, and then expand the boundaries of newsworthiness. I knew routine images would include the vendor and his wares, volunteers interacting with rally-goers, and the swaggering Stein supporter. To complement such anticipated content, I sought sounds and images one would not predict, to encourage people to consider the event from a different perspective, to jolt them from autopilot with the unexpected, and perhaps to evoke a generative affective response. So while the Stein supporter paced and hollered, I pointed my iPhone upward toward a lovely swaying tree and pushed the record button. The resulting video clip portrays the graceful limbs and leaves backdropped by a sky mottled with clouds, with wind buffering the microphone. In a faint afterthought, one can hear the disembodied cry of ‘Show us what DemExit looks like …’ Thus, the traditional journalistic content of a political speech act – the words of the goading protester – were presented on the same plane of immanence as the natural atmosphere in which they were uttered. The political language was both de- and re-contextualized in a potentially generative way. Such a move comports with NRT’s goal to ‘redirect attention from the posited meaning towards the material compositions and conduct of representations’ (Dewsbury et al., 2002: 438, emphasis in original).

Awaiting the main event and what I expected to be an ever-increasing crowd, I shot more pictures around the perimeter (leftward and rightward-facing red arrows along the rope line, an angled picture of a row of bicycles) and then completed my required texting and form-filling for admission to the event. A notable lack of new people streamed into the venue. I approached the stage and noted the full grandstand of reporters and photographers. At ground level, dozens of young people faced the stage, listening to the band. I recognized many journalism students, including my own, whom I had assigned to cover and live-tweet the event using conventional reporting methods. It occurred to me that a substantial proportion of attendees were, in fact, student reporters assigned by their professors to cover it. This only added to my understanding of the rally as a pseudo-event or simulation: staged for apprentice journalists to practice covering political events by covering one produced on their own campus.

Shortly before the band was ushered offstage, the leader passed on a message from the Clinton campaign encouraging the audience to text a phone number, adding amiably, ‘I’m not sure what it’s for’ and joking that maybe people might win something. I recorded this traditionally non-newsworthy but nevertheless evocative commentary with the camera trained loosely on a chalked line on the grassy field. When lower-bill speakers – a labor leader, a statewide judicial candidate – began addressing the crowd that had amassed to a few hundred, I continued looking for non-traditional images that might help people experience the broader plane of immanence on which the rally was occurring. I spent a lot of time with my back to the stage, watching the action behind me. In this way, I caught a couple of women rushing past, one hefting a toddler, in the thrall of some affective exchange.

When Sanders arrived, a cheer ran through the crowd and a small sea of onlookers parted to clear a path to the stage. It was my first in-person glimpse of Sanders – this larger-than-life character who had been one of the most electrifying personalities in the country for months – and I distinctly recall feeling … nothing. It was as though I were seeing him on television; the face was so familiar, the scenario of him greeting a crowd of young people so ingrained in my head, that the ‘reality’ of his presence was superseded by the multitude of digitized simulacra that preceded him. I felt attuned to Baudrillard’s (1983) concept of the simulation; he called it ‘the dissolution of TV into life, the dissolution of life into TV’ (p. 55).

The rest of the event was preordained: Sanders would ascend the stage, would utter more or less the same words in more or less the same order that he had been uttering in several locations earlier in the day and across the country for weeks. The small but partisan crowd would cheer at the appropriate times. The assembled news media would take the appropriate close-ups, the medium shots, and the face-in-the-crowd reactions; would capture the most pithy or energetic quote and sound bite; and would report dutifully for the Internet and the evening news and the morning paper as though the message were new and unique. Rejecting autopilot, I recorded bits of speech backdropped by evocative or mundane imagery, focusing on backpacks, on the sky, and on Sanders’ disembodied voice echoing from the massive building across the street. Such images had the simultaneous potential to disrupt viewers’ expectations of what happens at a political rally and to attune them to Sanders’ actual words by divorcing the language from the simulacra that trigger cognitive biases and shut down active listening. A particularly poignant clip features Sanders calling to preserve ‘a healthy, inhabitable planet’ while rain splashes gently on a stanchion in the grass.

Meanwhile, traditional media coverage of the event – at which, recall, professional and student reporters constituted a sizeable proportion of the participants – was generally predictable. The local daily newspaper featured a photograph of Sanders grinning or wincing as he waited to speak amid a sea of arms holding phones trained on his visage, a shot from the press grandstand overlooking the crowd as Sanders spoke, and a photo of a lone Trump supporter stoically holding a ‘Make America Great Again’ sign. The story’s lead read, ‘On the stump for Hillary Clinton, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders told an audience … on Thursday that this election is about income inequality and restoring the middle class in America’. It went on to quote Sanders lambasting Trump for his bigotry. The campus newspaper featured a photo of Sanders gesturing on stage before a sea of arms holding phones trained on his visage. It noted that ‘Sanders spoke about rights for women, the LGBT community and the homeless population. He also emphasized the importance of voting and that college tuition debt needs to be reduced’. A local TV station featured clips of Sanders gesturing at the podium from middle range and pulled back to show a sea of arms holding phones trained on his visage. The station also netted a one-on-one interview with Sanders, where it obtained these exclusive remarks:

Ask the people … if we should raise the minimum wage to a living wage. They do. Ask the people … if we need pay equity for women. They do. Ask the people … if they think that we should make public college and universities free for the middle class so that their kids can go to college and not leave deeply in debt. They do. Those are Clinton’s positions.

Compare the local coverage of this particular Sanders rally with a convenience sample of reporting from rallies across the country:

Sen. Bernie Sanders told a crowd of about 250 at Youngstown State University on Thursday that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has ‘gotten me very upset and very angry’.

Looking over a room of students and teachers on Tuesday at Dartmouth College, Sen. Bernie Sanders decided to conduct an informal poll. ‘How many people here have student debt?’ the progressive Vermonter asked the roughly 425 people gathered in Alumni Hall.

Sen. Bernie Sanders spoke at the University of Cincinnati to campaign for Hillary Clinton Thursday afternoon. … ‘What this election is about is which candidate has the ideas and the program to improve life for the working families and the middle class of this country’, he said.

While the writers of these stories did their jobs to localize the rallies and occasionally provide narrative or description that distinguished their work from their peers’, the essence of this content is indistinguishable: Bernie Sanders said the same thing at every event, and people reacted the same way, and but for a few local details a story written in Boston could have been written in Columbus could have been written in Madison. The simulacrum of Sanders preceded itself wherever he went.

Meanwhile, as the rally that anchors this study ended and Sanders disappeared, the Pharrell Williams song ‘Happy’ piped through speakers suspended from cranes brought in for the event. People began filing away down the snaking sidewalk toward other parts of campus, and one of my final clips is of people departing in orderly, unidirectional groups of one, two, or three – a tonal contrast with the music whose official video features a diverse array of people in various states of public dancing and singing. The last clip I took is actually reminiscent of the ‘Happy’ video, featuring a wide shot of three young women skipping into the distance in apparent affective connection with the music. I had turned the camera on too late and missed the best parts of this scene, but it made me happy to shoot it.

Discussion

The purpose of this article is to introduce a journalistic intervention into routinized, propagandistic political ‘pseudo-events’ (Boorstin, 1987 [1961]) that over time can lull reporters and citizens into stultified complacency about the electoral process while facilitating highly disciplined campaigns’ messaging at the expense of more substantive or broad-minded examination of issues facing voting publics. The intervention was inspired by scholarship on non-representational theory, a style of research that aims to disrupt automatic routines and encourage people to recognize possibilities for change in each moment. The method was to cover a standard political rally, as much as possible, from a perspective untethered to routine journalistic or political cues of what is and is not important, to widen our understanding of political relevance and open possibilities for political engagement through affective experience.

This effort was clearly not an attempt to coherently represent the message of Sanders or the event organizers, but, as an act of journalism, it was a no less accurate rendering of what occurred in that place at that time than the sound bites and images recorded more conventionally by the press on hand. A difference was that my images and recordings privileged the space as well as those who temporarily filled it, because spaces affect our potential to respond. To veer from preordained and interchangeable simulacrumatic images during made-for-media political events is to express a level of independence that journalists claim to aspire to but rarely perform. Such efforts also challenge the received view that standard event coverage represents the true ‘reality’ of what happened; they demonstrate that infinite realities are available depending on how one orients one’s attention.

Preordained words and images from a scripted rally such as Sanders’ may have some utility in preparing citizens for an election, but it is minimal. The content is, first, predictable, in that almost everyone knows what they will see before they see it. It is boring, in its sameness. It is manipulative, in its tested and packaged messaging. It is affectively arousing only in triggering habituated cues of attraction or revulsion, depending on the predispositions of the viewer. It contains political possibility within a very narrow band. This article argues that we can broaden the band by expanding our definition of what is politically relevant to a wider range of sensory and intellectual experience. Everything that took place in the venue of the Sanders rally was, in one way or another, political, because the background that people experienced – the light rain, the music, the dancing – affected the ways people heard, felt, and processed what Sanders had to say. NRT invites us to notice those subtle influences along with the obvious ones. By presenting unexpected images and experiences, this coverage can circumvent motivated reasoning and political habit patterns, opening the possibility for political ideas to resonate.

It is worth repeating that NRT is also conceived as ‘more-than-representational’ (Lorimer, 2005) in that it allows for traditional representation and the many elements of experience that are so often left out of our efforts to understand what’s happening now and what could happen next. A unified non-representational report of political events might blend traditional representational images and text with any other images and ideas that catch the reporter’s affective attention, placing the scripted and the experiential on the same plane of immanence and widening our understanding of what is politically relevant by increasing the range of actors that can make an explicit difference in forging political attitudes. This allows the journalist to perform her normative informational role for some citizens and to work toward journalism’s normative responsibility to make more people feel welcome to political experiences. To insist a priori that common-sense shots and scripted sound bites constitute the full range of politically relevant data from a campaign rally reflects a longstanding journalistic bias that has rendered politics irrelevant or insensible for huge swaths of people. A more normatively objective approach would be to present content from the scripted speech and multiple inputs from the attendant atmosphere, and let citizens decide which aspects are politically meaningful for them. For my part, the background dancing, running, and joking at Sanders’ rally made me feel hopeful and engaged, and juxtaposing his scripted words against unfamiliar backdrops made me more attentive, not less, to his message.

The intent of this project is not to argue that all reporting, even of pseudo-events, should eschew traditional representational methods. So how do we know when a non-representational reporting intervention might be constructive? How do we distinguish between a pseudo-event like Pence’s hot-dog viewing and an event that might fit Boorstin’s criteria but yield more beneficial voter information, like an unscripted town hall meeting? The answer depends on the paradigm. Normative news judgment would suggest that the more likely new information of a certain type is to be revealed – insight into the candidate’s character or temperament, a policy nuance, hints at the mood of voters – the more democratically beneficial and perhaps the less ‘pseudo’ the event will be.

Within a non-representational approach, however, such judgment is suspended. By placing all possibilities on the same plane of immanence, by scanning for politically relevant information and insights across a much wider expanse of affective observation, the distinction between the ‘pseudo’ and the ‘real’ event disappears. A non-representational approach to Pence and the hot-dog bun might include enough behind-the-scenes material, and enough discordant imagery, to penetrate the farce of political-press relations and render the event as revealing as a town hall meeting. Many pool reports themselves, before they are sanitized into conventional news stories, carry performative humor and pathos that, if shared with citizens, would let them in on the joke.

Journalists have not left the modern era; in fact, they cling to it with delusionary fervor. But, thanks in part to Trump’s bulldozing of political norms and in larger part to the media trends that enable him, the modern era has left journalists. While pseudo-events have been with us for at least a century (Boorstin, 1987 [1961]), their recent conflation with propaganda and the ‘post-truth’ crisis has rendered them dangerous in a way that traditional journalistic norms, such as piling fact on top of fact, cannot combat. Normative journalistic processes have not led in recent years to normative democratic outcomes in any Habermasian, deliberative sense – and not for lack of facts, which are abundant and accessible. Reporting facts may be necessary, but is surely insufficient, to induce meaningful democratic participation (Parks, 2017). So, do journalists continue to operate from 20th-century values that contemporary politics has rendered obsolete? Or do they recognize what they are up against and join the fray? A non-representational approach helps dissolve normative constraints that render journalists and citizens helpless against non-normative political actors by allowing them to be as adaptable and unpredictable as the manipulators. Tipping the power to construct political meaning in favor of citizens is a highly relevant journalistic act.

As to whether the present intervention succeeded, I’m aware of no basis on which to judge this type of journalism research, beyond the effect it has on you and me. From my own experience, I would offer a qualified ‘yes’. My reporting was different from any coverage I witnessed of this particular rally or any political rally I’ve seen. My efforts ensured that I, for one, was fully awake to the experience and attuned to its unique aspects rather than focusing solely on the automatic conventions that made it the same as every other Bernie Sanders rally. My Twitter hashtag (#NRT_Sanders) includes video clips that some viewers might find perplexing, intriguing, puzzling, delighting, and perhaps infuriating – all affective responses that standard coverage would be unlikely to evoke. It expands what the canon of the event’s coverage allows for as ‘real’ and relevant – as did Kurt Lang in the MacArthur parade experiment – by presenting the lived experience of the people in the crowd. It shows that Bernie Sanders was not the only actor – and perhaps not even the primary actor – making a difference on that field that day. Expanding available political experiences might encourage citizens to view propagandistic events in a new light, perhaps to draw on their intellect to fill open spaces with their own thoughts and impressions and to intuit more possible outcomes. The intended effect may be more artistic than traditionally journalistic, but a goal of NRT is to smudge the boundaries between these practices and to produce disruptions – not ‘permanent solutions’, but rather ‘escape attempts, some of which [c]ould take root: a series of fireworks inserted into everyday life’ (Thrift, 2008: 4).

Limitations of this study abound. A better photographer would have conceived and executed more interesting images. I’m not sure any of the work evoked a sense of wonder, a key trait identified by many non-representational researchers. I wish I’d made the video clips longer by 5 or 10 seconds – it’s good to leave people wanting more, but as a viewer I’m just warming up to these evocations when they quit on me. And, respecting NRT’s additive nature, it would have made sense to include traditionally representative sound bites and images among my more unusual posts.

Possibilities are endless for future research into how non-representational approaches can help journalism reassert its autonomy against contrived political messaging, produce generative and affectively powerful content that surprises as well as informs, and empower people to shake off the autopilot that has nearly destroyed somnambulant democracies. Jimmy Breslin’s Kennedy tribute, while in many ways a work of conventional journalism, lends itself to non-representational analysis, as does much of the work of the 1960s ‘New Journalists’. The experiment behind this study, which employs starkly different means than Breslin’s, is a response to current political, cultural, and technological conditions. Instantaneous social sharing, 360° lenses, and virtual reality both necessitate and can facilitate non-representational understandings by opening up who can affect and interpret events.

Due to NRT’s ephemerality – the ideas are intriguing but hard to put into practice within generally accepted research paradigms (Vannini, 2015) – it will take much additional work to thoroughly explore its implications for journalism research. This study is an attempt to use non-representational thinking as a skillful means of disrupting a toxic democratic ritual – as a way of rendering more relevant those events that are designed to lull us to sleep by expanding what can count as relevant. If we believe as a society that journalism should foster widespread and robust political participation, then we need to open ways for politics to manifest beyond existing narrow conceptions. If we keep doing the same kind of journalism, we’re going to keep getting the same kind of democracy.