Abstract
This is an introdcution to a special section in the journal in which we examine terrorism as a media event. The introduction reviews the classic works by Elihu Katz and Daniel and adds our own contemporary extension of their theories. It acknowledges the significance of temporality and related mnemonic patterns (Zelizer, Kraidy, in this introduction); networked, relational territorialities (Kraidy, in this introduction); and the discursive politics applied to categorize the violence in question (Hervik; Cui and Rothenbuhler; Price, in this introduction), but it also suggests a more detailed focus on the hybrid dynamics between actors, platforms, and messages which circulate during violent media events. The authors continue the debate on the complex relationship between media, event, and terror by introducing hybridity as yet another angle to this topical discussion.
In the post-9/11 era, collective, mediated imaginations in the West have been formed around a dichotomous perception of enmities between the supporters of the free world and the Islamic terrorists who are threats to the Western values of democracy, freedom of speech, and liberty. This media narrative, epitomized in acts of violence marked as terror, has permeated the consciousness of a global audience and has stirred extensive public reaction in the global media. In this special section, we set out to study how these kinds of globally disruptive incidents of violence-marked-as-terror become events in today’s digital media environment, and what this media-saturated event-making implies as we interpret the historical, cultural, social, and political significance of these actions to our contemporary and digital lives. In this introduction, we wish to review some of the early debates in theorizing the relationship between terror, media, and event. We take our inspiration from the work of Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz (1992), and suggest a new conceptual idea to better understand the dynamics of present-day media spectacles of terrorist violence.
One of the key starting points in unfolding the dynamics between terror, media, and event in the present world is the book Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. The authors Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz introduce the idea of media event as a special genre that is powerful enough to interrupt the everyday media flow (with its “coronations,” “contests,” and “conquests”), bringing TV viewers in touch with society’s central values, and inviting the audience to participate in the event (Daniel and Katz 1992, 5–9). The common denominator among events in this original work is how the media performance connected ceremoniality with social cohesion. Through the vibrant scholarly debate that followed the book’s publication, the theory of media events’ enduring strength has been its insightful articulation of the role of media rituals during certain exceptional moments in modern society (see, for example, Couldry et al. 2010). The main criticisms of the theory have addressed (1) the assumed ceremonial and integrative functions of media events, (2) the exclusion of disruptive or traumatic events from the theory, and (3) the strong focus on television and broadcasting, which may be inadequate to study global, web-based media events (Cottle 2006; Couldry 2003; Fiske 1994; Hepp 2015; Kellner 2003; Nossek 2008; Rothenbuhler 2010; Scannell 1995, 2014; Sreberny 2016).
Dayan and Katz have responded to these critiques and have readjusted their ideas in different public forms. In “‘No more peace!’ How Disaster, Terror and War Have Upstaged Media Events,” Katz and Liebes (2007, 2010) suggested that the focus of analysis should be shifted from conquests, contests, and coronations to disaster, terror, and war. According to them, We believe that cynicism, disenchantment, and segregation are undermining attention to ceremonial events, while the mobility and ubiquity of television technology, together with the downgrading of scheduled programming, provide ready access to disruption. If ceremonial events may be characterized as “co-productions” of broadcasters and establishments, then disruptive events may be characterized as “co-productions” of broadcasters and anti-establishment agencies, i.e. the perpetrators of disruption (Ibid., 157).
Furthermore, Katz and Liebes wrote that marathons of terror, natural disaster, and war—media disasters—should be distinguished from media events as a separate genre. These mediatized disasters have become far removed from the ceremonial roots of the original formulation of media events (Cottle 2006; Liebes 1998; Liebes and Blondheim 2005). In “Beyond Media Events: Disenchantment, Derailment, Disruption,” Dayan (2010) also revised his thinking about media events. For him, the “macabre accoutrements to televised ordeals, punishments, and tortures” and the emphasis on “stigmatization and shaming” in today’s mediatized public events caused media events to lose their potential to reduce conflict; instead, they “foster divides, and install and perpetuate schisms” (Ibid., 26–27).
In this new geopolitics and media ecosystem, media events tend to lose their distinct character and instead migrate toward other genres. New media events are no longer clearly differentiated entities, but exist on a continuum. Dayan suggests this “banalization of the format” produces what he calls “almost” media events. Dayan reminds us that the pragmatics of media events have changed as messages have become multiple, audiences selective, and social networks ubiquitous. He summarizes the difference between televised, ceremonial media events and media events of contemporary media circumstances in the following manner: Interpersonal networks and diffusion processes are active before and after the event, mobilizing attention to the event and fostering intensive hermeneutic attempts to identify its meaning. But during the liminal moments we described in 1992, totality and simultaneity were unbound; organizers and broadcasters resonated together; competing channels merged into one; viewers gathered at the same time and in every place. All eyes were fixed on the ceremonial centre, through which each nuclear cell was connected to all the rest (Ibid., 27).
Dayan leaves the reader in a state of skepticism. For him, in today’s “contested territory of media events,” the most likely consequences are disenchantment and the loss of the “we”—the most critical functions of media events (see also Dayan 2006).
In the rest of this essay, we wish to reflect upon those two intellectual replies offered by Dayan (2010) and Katz and Liebes (2007) in conversation with the articles in this special section. In line with Katz and Liebes, we argue for the significance of the violent media event as a special genre. Yet we emphasize the need to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the kind of violence in question and related motivations associated with it to better address the complexity of the relationship between media, event, and terror in the present conjuncture. In addition, we point to the significance of Dayan’s (2010) idea of the loss of “we” and discuss how that loss might affect our thinking about the workings of violent media events in the future.
We start with Barbie Zelizer’s article in which she examines the idea of media events in the framework of time and memory. She reflects the sense of the present and liveness in media events. She argues for the necessity to consider those mnemonic patterns that frame our interpretations of the present as we experience terrorist violence converted into an event in the media. Her own empirical reflections draw on the Cold War era and the type of bellicose-mindedness in that historical period.
Zelizer’s insight into the temporality of media events and schema for interpreting terror and violence resonates well with Peter Hervik’s article. He claims that the 2005 Muhammad cartoon crisis in Denmark continues to function as a discursive reference point for new violent media events about terror today. This mnemonic schema operates with a certain spatial-racial logic and, thus, enforces racialized and nationalistic politics of exclusion. Hervik’s article can be interpreted as an empirically founded commentary on the discursive logics present in contemporary media events of terror, one that shows how those logics affect media events as performances of dividedness and distortion, rather than unity and solidarity.
In the article that follows, Xi Cui and Eric Rothenbuhler grab onto the communicative logic and the cultural meaning-making of “terrorism” in violent media events of terror. The authors emphasize the need to denaturalize the connection between media and terrorism. They underline how terrorism is always embedded in the processes of mediatization and ritualization for those events. Cui and Rothenbuhler remind the reader of the significance of rethinking classical media event theory in the framework of cultural categories, such as ordinary versus exceptional and chaos versus order. They argue the dynamics between those categories continue shaping our socially shared perceptions of terror in society beyond the television era.
Taking a different perspective from political communication, Stuart Price continues with the theme of categorizing terrorism in the media event. In his article, he discusses the instability of terrorism as a linguistic category. He uses Germanwings plane crash in 2015 to illustrate. In Price’s view, media organizations, as well as executive authorities, are key players in making decisions over how to categorize different violent incidents and whether to classify them as terrorist attacks, or not. The instability and unpredictability associated with humans categorizing terrorism may lead to counterproductive outcomes and bring about social instability. His serious indictment resonates well with Hervik’s argument that media events may further racialization in those societies. Price and Hervik remind us that we need to be more aware which events we call terrorist events, on which ground we make our classifications, and what are the implications of those decisions.
The last article in this special section takes the reader back to the theme of temporality, but positions it in relation to terror and territoriality as relational and affectively intense. Moving from the idea of disruptive media events by Katz and Liebes (2007), Marwan Kraidy emphasizes the globality of media events and he suggests a new concept to more accurately describe networked and mediatized terrorist violence: the hypermedia event. These events that Kraidy explains are contentious, emergent, fragmented, and bottom-up. As do most of the authors in this special section, Kraidy uses Islamic terrorism to illustrate his argument. This emphasis reflects the current understanding of not only where the media locates violence but also where we as scholars must critically analyze the assumptions associated with this social fact.
Our interview with Daniel Dayan provides a critical reflection on the development of media event theory and its current relevance in rethinking today’s globalized spectacles of terrorist violence.
Three Strands for Hybrid Media Events
In the remaining space here, we continue the debate on the complex relationship between media, event, and terror by introducing hybridity as yet another angle to this issue. In addition to acknowledging the significance of temporality and related mnemonic patterns (Zelizer, Kraidy); networked, relational territorialities (Kraidy); and the discursive politics applied to categorize violence in question (Hervik; Cui and Rothenbuhler; Price), we suggest a more detailed focus on the hybrid dynamics between actors, platforms, and messages which circulate during violent media events. As the political communication scholar Andrew Chadwick (2013, 3) notes, hybridity can be seen as “something like an ontology,” a theoretical disposition providing us with a possibility to ask and answer new kinds of questions about “the nature of contemporary society,” with violent media events a case in point here. We define hybridity through the work of three authors.
In his earlier work, Marwan Kraidy (2005) takes a communicative approach to hybridity and discusses it in the context of culture, international communication, and media. He emphasizes that cross-cultural contact is often the prerequisite for hybridity, as it is about “fusion of distinct forms, styles, or identities” (Ibid., 9). In his work, not only the movement of cultural commodities, such as media programs and cultural exchange through the media, but also the movement of people, all count as types of contact that lead to hybridity. These carry ideas and practices, giving way to hybridization. Kraidy’s approach, however, reaches beyond culture when he points out that “politico-economic considerations shape current day hybrid media” as “the pervasiveness of hybridity in some ways reflects the synchronization of world markets” (Ibid.). What is more, Kraidy notes that hybridity is fully compatible with globalization.
To this definition, Bruno Latour’s perspective on hybridity is twofold, or rather two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, he writes that the distinction between nature and culture/society in modern, western thought is counterintuitive and counterproductive. On the other hand, he emphasizes the hybridity between human and nonhuman actors. In the book-length essay We Have Never Been Modern (Latour 1993), he calls for an anthropological approach to western societies, which would see beyond the institutionalized distinctions that define modernity. Latour uses media here, and the newspaper in particular, as an example of institutionalized compartmentalization. His essay begins with a description of reading Le Monde, in which the world is neatly separated into sections: science, politics, economy, law, religion, technology, and fiction. Latour’s harshest critique, however, is reserved for the different “fiefdoms of criticism” in academia: the epistemologists who insist on the reality of facts, the sociologists obsessed with power structures, and the deconstructionists fixated on discursive borders. Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT) is a practical solution to investigate the hybrid networks of actors—human and nonhuman—in the seamless fabric of nature-culture. For him, all of these actors are simultaneously real (like nature), narrated (like discourse), and collective (like society; see Ibid., 6).
Chadwick (2013) then starts from what Latour (1993) would call a modernist perception that hybridity is about blending institutional boundaries and roles. He considers the relationship between mass media and journalism with politics, particularly around elections. Chadwick’s concept of hybrid media system reflects an Anglo-American, socio-geographic-historical context to “provide an empirically informed interpretive account of key aspects of systemic change in the political communication environments of Britain and the United States” which now “have what are now best characterized as hybrid media systems” (Ibid., 3). In his work, hybridity reflects the integrated roles of older and newer media institutions in political communication, a phenomenon he studies through the logics of older and newer media practices.
While these authors’ notions of hybridity have different epistemological premises, making their combined application somewhat challenging, they also have commonalities. All three acknowledge the hybridity of culture, the hybridity across different domains of society, and hybridity as a phenomenon that brings different elements and objects into new existences. These ideas inspire us with a series of questions about global, media events of terrorist violence. How does the hybridity between human and nonhuman actors in our contemporary media environment intertwine technology, human action, and discourses? How do power relations in the hybrid cultures of international communication and media, in part caused by simplified perceptions of the West and the rest, allow us to focus on intercultural relations allow us to integrate agency and structure into international communicational analysis? How does an empirically grounded idea of hybridity in a media system help us understand transitions and relations between older and newer media institutions? Toward these answers, we offer the concept hybrid media environment to refer to the type of flexibility and openness necessary to understand the floating dynamics at play in today’s flow of intensified and event-making violence.
In the hybrid media environment, media events also become hybridized. The blurring of production and consumption, dispersal of channels and platforms, and the segmentation of audiences create new complexities, accentuating questions of temporality and territoriality related to violent media events. The revenue logic of a hybrid media event differs clearly from the revenue logic of traditional media events (both ceremonial and disruptive). Unlike in the era of mass communications, when communication flowed from one to many, a hybrid media event is based on a sharing economy that favors news that quickly attracts mass attention through a many-to-many communicative flow (see also Bennett and Segerberg 2013). Social media platforms create possibilities for sharing, recommendation, and liking as new media practices that challenge and motivate changes in professional media organizations that are also using these social media. Hybrid media events of violence are often also sites of informational manipulation and conspiracy theories, as well as propaganda (see, for example, Sumiala et al. 2016). Contents that evoke strong emotions and that reinforce existing prejudices are ideally suited to this kind of circulation. It seems that we are only beginning to understand how the relations of the intertwined actors are formed and change in the figurations of the hybrid media event (e.g., Couldry and Hepp 2016; Vaccari et al. 2015).
This all takes us back to Dayan’s (2010) question of the loss of “we” in present-day violent media events. The accelerated speed of circulation in hybrid media events contributes to quick, stereotypical interpretations of the reasons and consequences of events. For example, metonymic connections between freedom and West and Islam and terrorism are activated instantly. The western “we” live in the anticipation of the next hybrid media event of terrorism. This expectation creates a crisis mode that can be—and has been—used as a justification for increasing control, surveillance, and limitations to civil rights in “The Free World.” The paradox of countering terrorism then is that it ends up realizing the aims of terrorists themselves: by increasing fear and insecurity, and by limiting freedom in democratic societies. This special section attempts to push intellectual work to ask who is the “we” in those accelerated circulations of violence, in those patterns of thought in our mnemonic schemes, and in global communication of violent media events. The possible futures are unstable and unpredictable but at least we are aware.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.