From live-tweets to archives of the future: Mixed media temporalities and the recent French terrorist attacks

Alongside the “arrival” of digital communication technologies in the 20th century, the experience of time appears to have been altering. Hartmut Rosa (2013) has labeled this phenomenon social acceleration and François Hartog (2014) has analysed the regime of presentism in relation to the difficulty for historical narratives to take shape. These tendencies, presumably reinforced with the Web 2.0 and other forms of digital capitalism (Wajcman, 2015), concern everyday life communication, the work place, economic and financial exchanges but also the routines of journalists, newsrooms and war correspondents (see Risso, 2017). This evolution has at the same time fostered the so-called slow movements, such as slower journalism or slow food: forms and expressions of resistance or at least tendecies of (commodified) deceleration. These temporal shifts and interplays are also of importance when it comes to the question of terrorism, its organization and mediatization.

This special issue does not focus on the way terrorist organizations adapt to these new temporal realities or how they use communication technologies. Rather, it is interested in how these social changes transform and perform – or not (the idea of social acceleration is not the explanation for everything) – the way news media narrate terrorist attacks, how the reactions to the latter are shared in (online) social media and how the public and institutions try to archive traces of the event for future historical and commemorative work. Also, instead of fostering the idea of one simple, homogeneous macro-acceleration of society, this special issue wishes to emphasize the existence of different time layers in media discourses (Niemeyer, 2011) and the possibility of various temporal engagements with media technologies offered to their users (Keightley, 2012).

In recent years, research on media has been increasingly occupied with the nature of media’s relation to time (see Kaun et al., 2016) or more specifically with the nature of journalism and time (Zelizer, 2018). So why now? According to Harold Innis (1961), the stability of Western societies has for ages depended on its balancing of the distribution of knowledge over time and across space. To the extent that dominant forms of communication in any given society tended to privilege one of these categories (as with the overwhelming ‘space-bias’ of 20th-century mass media), it would sooner or later experience a loss of, or develop a special concern for, that category’s other (and towards the end of the 20th century, this would be time).

For whatever reason, concerns about our own time being ‘out of joint’ or in crisis has indeed been raised during the last two or three decades from several quarters. Claude Dubar (2011) interestingly states that this temporal crisis is related to the increasing gaps between historical, political, financial and personal time. One assumption, frequently brought to the front in debates on ‘postmodernism’, cultural memory and ideological progress, has identified the waning of our collective sense of historical time: for at least as long as we were ‘modern’, the path of history was leading towards that endlessly open future, and the past, should we care to look in the rearview mirror, could be organized to appear in linear succession. Some claimed this path had reached its end (Fukuyama, 1989). Others noted our increasing interest to look towards pasts in the future (Assmann, 2013), turning the path into a two-way street. Some would rather argue that we were lost in the field of a ‘monstrous present’, ever-expanding into our pasts and futures (Hartog, 2005; Tomlinson, 2007). Within media and communication studies, further ‘disorientation’ came with digitization, convergence, and ‘living archives’: new machines that blurred the logics of media specificity, including those divisions between ‘space-biased’ or ‘time-biased’ media, and thereby, the shape of historical progress through the apparently linear succession of dominant, ‘single’ media. In extension, our everyday use of digital data would expose sudden continuities with ancient ‘logistical’ and ‘environmental’ devices (calendars, clocks, towers, ships, see Durham Peters, 2015), with ‘media’ less concerned with the transmission of messages than with the making up of our habitat, the organization of our sense of time and place (Keightley, 2012).

The latter assumption could, of course, be recognized as an echo of Marshall McLuhan, from back in the early 1960s, i.e. the heydays of modernism and broadcasting media. This should, in itself, raise some suspicion about overwriting the periodical rhythms of historical, temporal and technological development (as in postmodernism = presentism = the digital age). McLuhan’s thinking was already well saturated with presentism and anti-linearity, particularly so when assessing the dominant (pre-digital, modern) medium of his own time: television. In the eyes of historians and philosophers, the loss of modern time – if not time and history itself – was preferably exemplified by televisual forms and practices: witnessing the live broadcast of the moon landing in 1969 being declared ‘historic’ by a ‘monopolistic’ media system, historian Pierre Nora realized the need for new conceptual tools for his own discipline (Nora, 2014). During the following decades, television was curiously and paradoxically related to both the ‘collapse’ (Hoskins, 2004) and the ‘upsurge’ (Nora, 2002) of cultural memory. Recent divisive debates on ‘mediatization’ may also bear witness to how Media and Communication Studies struggles to establish its own ‘historical vision’ (Deacon and Stanyer, 2014; Lunt and Livingstone, 2016). In its shorthand applications, ‘mediatization’ may still invite us to think the historical process in terms of successive progress, but reflection may also go further to include ideas of interwoven eras, intensifications, accelerations, accumulations and revolutions (Balbi, 2015; Niemeyer 2011; Sonnevend, 2016; Ytreberg, 2017). How, then, is one to approach the interrelation of these assumptions: on the one hand, the waning of a shared, modern historicity, on the other, the media-induced organization of temporality, as this unfolds in the digital practices of everyday lives? To start off, one might recognize that temporalities have always been ‘multiple’ (Jordheim, 2012, 2014), that ‘intuitive’ (Koselleck, 2002) and ‘intimate’ experiences of time (Ricoeur, 1984) have always been anchored in ‘cultural techniques’ (Beck, 1994; Siegert, 2015). In other words, to the extent that there ever existed a single regime of modern, historical time (future-oriented, accelerating, etc.), this may be assumed to be the outcome of a synchronizing process (Jordheim, 2012, 2014) involving, integrating, perhaps de-synchronizing, a number of other co-existent time scales (biological, generational, cyclical, narrative, etc.). And, to the extent that this temporal experience was ever collectively shared, it involved a number of technological, social, material and spatial practices.

This collection on media practices during recent terror events in France has not pre-assumed the existence of an overarching or dominant temporal ‘regime’, or the social ‘acceleration’ (Rosa, 2013) of current societies. In terms of their media representations, the Paris attacks will certainly display similarities with the ‘third phase of mediatization’ of war (Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2015), as well as with ‘old’ and ‘new’ forms of the so-called media event (Dayan and Katz, 1992; Nora, 1997, 2015). Such concepts do not, however, provide a common or homogeneous framework for the articles presented in this special issue. The articles focus on the events that occurred in 2015 in Paris, in January (labeled the Charlie Hebdo attacks) and November (labeled the 13th November attacks). Specifically, they tackle the diverse and mixed temporalities through which these events are narrated, experienced and archived in a multitude of media-related and other social practices.

The first article, written by Julien Fragnon, explores the discursive patterns that preempt the 2015 events by analyzing the circulation of the word ‘war’ in French anti-terrorist discourse since the 1980s. Like Nora (2015), Fragnon argues that the 2015 events can be seen as a discursive rupture. His reflection on the performative power and evolution of political speech offers the possibility to seize a better understanding of how journalists and French society responded to the events. As the reactions and narratives can be seen as a spreading network of information, news, emotions and interpretations, the articles that follow Fragnon’s view on the historical and political framework have not been put into a chronological order by the editors, with the objective of offering the possibility to rethink and revisit the different temporalities, from its archiving for the future to the liveness of its very first hours. Valérie Schafer, Gérôme Truc, Romain Badouard, Lucien Castex and Francesca Musiani focus their analysis on the ‘real-time’ institutional archiving by the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France, BnF) and the National Audio-visual Institute (Institut national de l’audiovisuel, Ina). They explore the creation and temporalities of this ‘born-digital’ heritage and the implications of how a live tweet becomes both a sort of instant history and a part of a future historiographical process. Maëlle Bazin’s contribution also takes on the ‘Je suis Charlie’ tweets, and asks how this viral formula became part of urban spaces and public places. She focuses on the origin and meanings of the statement and explains its wide circulation in social online and ‘offline’ networks. Her view on post-attack graffitis is based on data from private graffiti-cleaning companies and underpins the historical importance of photographs taken by local authorities with other purposes than, for instance, the National Library of France or the National Audio-Visual Institute.

The ‘Je suis Charlie’ slogan is also part of Katharina Niemeyer’s analysis of international front pages published the day after the Charlie Hebdo attacks as this sentence was reproduced in various forms (photographs, print screens, etc.). The analysis of more than a thousand front pages provides a critical overview of existing types, while discussing to what extent the attack of 7 January was part of world events, covered by a media predominantly using uniform sources. The front page occupies an intermediate place between immediate media interventions, ‘live’ coverage (special broadcasts, amateur video reactions on social networks, etc.) and analyses attempting to explain and narrate in detail the facts and their possible consequences over the following days, while also providing potential material for future historical work.

The last article, written by Johanna Sumiala, Minttu Tikka and Katja Valaskivi, demonstrates the aspects of intensified liveness by referring to the circulation of selected tweets during the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Their analysis is based on a multi-method approach developed for the empirical study of hybrid media events. The authors argue that the liveness, as experienced and carried out simultaneously on multiple platforms, favors stereotypical and immediate interpretations. This condition further accelerated the conflict between the different participants engaged in the event.

This special issue thus provides an insight into how political and media discourses meet social online and offline reactions during a period of rupture and experienced terror. It also raises issues in regard to the ‘born-digital’ heritage, a concept fostered by Schafer et al. in this issue, by asking how this various and conflicting material might be ‘synchronized’ in terms of historical analysis.

There is of course an acceleration of how emotions and first news are shared and spread within (digital) social networks, but the question of potential historical narratives also comes to the forefront: how to deal with the different online and offline traces left of an event? Not to forget that these tweets and shares are interwoven with moments of silence and grief that are taking place in public or private and intimate spaces, within a temporality that does not take into consideration the often fast flows of news. In this sense, this special issue analyzes these various temporalities that appear within a very special dramatic event and underpins the importance of detecting and reflecting the different ways terror is experienced and mediatized.