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- Volume 5, Issue 2, 2014
Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2014
Volume 5, Issue 2, 2014
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Being there from afar: The media event relocated to the public viewing area
Authors: Karin Becker and Andreas WidholmAbstractThis article examines the media event as relocated to public viewing areas (PVAs) erected in cities across the globe, where people gather to watch the events together live on-screen. The study is based on ethnographic research carried out in PVAs located in selected cities during the 2010 FIFA World Cup and the 2012 Summer Olympics. We examine the relationships between these events, as reconstituted in these different locations through media networks, and the public’s participation via the event on-screen. The PVA emerges as a new location of experience and participation, with its own histories as a place of attraction for the local public and for visitors from afar, in what D. Massey would describe as an ‘intersection of local and global social relations’. The host city arena is no longer the self-evident ‘centre’ for this event, which has been pluralized through the complex web of media structures and the activities of participants who come to experience the event in these other, dispersed locations.
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Broken rituals: On the disintegrative power of conflictive media events on English Wikipedia
By Paško BilićAbstractThe article studies the integrative social capacities of media events, as hypothesized by Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, to understand the transformation of media events in the network era. Media events have become increasingly deterrritorialized and performed within cultures of spatial reach across different mediated centres that transcend national borders. In the global and network age media events are performed not only as integrative, but also as disruptive and conflictive. A case study follows closely the dynamic by which the audience of English Wikipedia editors reacts to global media reports, and reorganizes information to create new event spheres based on specific internal community norms and values. Due to a conflictive event, or a disaster marathon, it was difficult for the community to integrate the available information and it experienced a series of failed performances. The event was filled with anxiety, distrust and disagreements over its nature and outcome. Nonetheless, with the affordances of networked technologies and globally dispersed community of editors, Wikipedia performed the role of an online host community of the event by creating and renegotiating a new definition and meaning of the event.
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The ethnocultural film festival as media happening: French-Maghrebi film in Marseille
More LessAbstractThis article analyses the efforts of a local film festival to bridge the cultures north and south of the Mediterranean by bringing North African film to Marseille. Marseille’s distance from national broadcast culture underscores the city as an unlikely host for an integrative media event, but allows for an examination of how the small scale of the community film festival provides an important counterpoint to the national thrust of the broadcast media event. Such festivals are non-broadcast media events. They are local, face-to-face, and immediate (i.e., live in a non-broadcast sense). They constitute a form of ‘slow media’, several days of physical presence in the theatre, focused viewing, and shared public discussion between film-makers and audiences. As such, the ethnocultural film festival is a media happening that strives to interrupt the continuous broadcast of official media events that picture the lives of minority communities in ways that run counter to their experience and understanding of them.
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Beyond the blue fence: Inequalities and spatial segregation in the development of the London 2012 Olympic media event
More LessAbstractThis article presents two cases studies of local resistance to the conscious effort of Olympics actors to use East London as representational space to produce and reinforce dominant nationalist and neo-liberal themes in the 2012 Olympic media event narrative. The blue Olympic fence, a 17.5-kilometre plywood barrier that encased the Olympic Park construction site, is used as a device in both case studies to explore the production and contestation of discourses of Olympic space. It is argued that the blue fence is both the subject and object of discourse about the purposes, values, impacts and flows of Olympics-led development. The first case study is an analysis of alternative representations of East London produced by local political leaders who found themselves on the wrong side of the blue fence and frustrated by the weak community engagement efforts of Olympic organizers. The second case study is an analysis of digital and transmedia projects and texts produced by local East London residents in response to the Olympic blue fence and the Olympic narrative it stood for.
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Remaking the ‘World-Class City’: The Commonwealth Games as a media event in ‘Emerging India’
More LessAbstractThis article examines the Delhi Commonwealth Games as a media event that facilitated the creation of a divided ‘global city’ at a time when India is celebrated as a rising economic power. The remaking of the capital city of Delhi promised employment and inclusion for India’s subaltern majority. However, the neo-liberal state in conjunction with powerful corporations was involved in accelerated processes of land grabs that dispossessed many urban poor communities. The English-language press was a powerful force in emphasizing deadlines for urban projects and manufacturing consent for unequal modernization through the spectacle of the Games. ‘India Emerging’ was a common frame used by the international media to point to India’s economic success and to simultaneously question its ability to modernize. The international and national media played a vital role in mobilizing elite support for beautification projects while mainly remaining silent on violent processes of urban cleansing. Further, news frames focused on ‘squalor’ and ‘shame’ associated with a narrow understanding of ‘corruption’ that denied the voices of marginalized communities in the city. It is vital to locate the relationship between sports media events and stratified host cities to understand contemporary debates about contested processes of globalization.
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The discursive representation of host locations in a sports media event: Locating the ‘Real Site’ of Formula One
By Claire EvansAbstractLocations are often chosen to host major sporting events because of their world and economic status, whilst the hosting of a major sporting event further enhances the standing of a host-location on a global scale. The media play a central role in depicting the image and values of the host-destinations on display, but unlike other major sporting events, such as the World Cup or the Olympic Games that travel to a different destination every four years, the FIA Formula One World Championship travels to multiple worldwide destinations in the course of a season. Live broadcasts routinely represent both traditional and modern Formula One venues to viewers; especially during programme openings, where they are aligned to: the local, unique characteristics of the destinations travelled to; the global ethos of the sport; and the media context itself. Using illustrative examples from British broadcasts of Formula One, I explain why delineating the ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ of a sports media event is questionable, but although it throws doubt on our ability to pinpoint the ‘real site’ of a global sports event, it nevertheless illustrates the position that sports, host-locations and the media have as part of a global network.
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