The Pope’s visit to Reunion - Media Event

By Daniel Dayan

Terms and definitions within the article:

1. Event - The concept of event is ambiguous, it often refers to several types of realities.

These realities are distinct, but they all are linked to the universe of meaning and all beg

access to narratives. Paddy Scannell1 describes events as “happenings”, as “things that

occur”, things to which we try to ascribe meaning.

2. “Making sense of” - is a matter of journalism and often consists of finding someone

responsible for “what happened”. Without becoming understandable, the event enters the

world of meaning-ness, of things that can be explained.

3. Expressive events - are discursive acts and sometimes are difficult to identify who

actually speaks.

4. Television - is more than a witness to the event; it is one its essential players. The

television of expressive events, of occasions is analyzed by Elihu Katz and Daniel Dayan2

as Media Events.

5. Media Events - it can content itself with offering broadcasts about rituals, but it may be

also capable of miming ritual phenomena, thus offering not only images, but equivalents

of rituals. Certain media events are not simply “televised ceremonies”, i.e. ceremonies

whose images happen to be in mass circulation.

6. Ritualization - affects the very performance and reception of television, and TV

ritualization easily coexists with the initial one.

7. The ritual universe - has developed a dimension that had previously been excluded,

such as distance between celebration and participation. One may speak of rituals without

physical contact, of rituals to be reconstructed at home.

8. Criteria of validation - are quite different when happenings are involved. They concern

newsworthiness, reliability of information and when symbolic events are involved.

9. Modes of discourses - Gestures are particularly fragile and vulnerable to criticism.

Gestures can be momentous or they can remain mere gesticulations.

1 Paddy Scannell. (2000). For anyone-as someone-structures. Media, Culture and Society. 22, 5-24. 2 Daniel Dayan & Elihu Katz (1992). Media events: The live broadcasting of history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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10. “Deep play” and “Shallow play” - The two terms were coined by Clifford Geertz3

who answered to the question as to why some cockfights are important and some other

are not; the answer he gave is that the importance resides from the identities of the cock

owners. A fight means much more and stakes are higher when prominent personalities

are involved. This difference between ‘deep play’ and ‘shallow play’ is a matter of

validation.

11. Pseudo-events - are validated by no other than the media that broadcast them.

12. Center - is an institutionalized core of values and beliefs, they are constantly

challenged by reformulating themselves, they are eminently ‘constructed’, and this

‘constructedness’ does not contradict their ‘reality’. Clifford Geetz describes a center as

an offer of meaning. It is defined by a capacity to represent, to illustrate a cosmic order.

13. Public sphere - is characterized by the nature of the ongoing debates. The diversity of

accounts concerning the same event helped to underline the diversity of public spheres.

14. Link - Philip Schlesinger4 stressed the existence of an implicit link between the public

sphere and the nation-state.

15. Public space of representation - is a concept coined by Habermas5 who describes it as

a public sphere constructed by a center in view of exerting, maintaining or reestablishing

its control.

16. The Church’s “translation” - is a ritual aimed at redistributing fragments of the relics

of saints to the most remote communities of an expanding Catholicism. This ceremony is

the ceremony of the Adventus or Advent. What television broadcast is an authentic

advent.

17. Panegyrist - a person who is in charge of exalting the virtues of the visitor and the

bringing out the meaning of the visit. This person may be compared with a modern world

journalist says Daniel Dayan.

18. Discursive architecture - it juxtaposes several discourses, each of which has a specific

author, a specific recipient, and a specific object.

3 Clifford Geetz (1973). The interpretation of culture. New York: Basic Books.4 Philip Schlesinger (1996). Europeanization and the media: National identity and the public sphere. In T. Slatta (Ed.), Media and the transition of collective identities. (IMK Report Series No.18). Oslo, Norway: University of Oslo Press.5 Habermas (1962). The structural transformation of the public sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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19. Diversity - Arjun Appadurai6 has attempted to describe diversity of contemporary

societies so as to illustrate the basic heterogeneity of those societies. In describing them,

he has used metaphors from landscape paintings, specifically the endings “-scape”.

20. “Mediascape” - The mass of images and information circulating from one end of the

planet to another is organized into diverse media landscapes. These ‘mediascapes’ are

characterized by the amount and nature of the diversity they offer: by their hospitability

to, or rejection of, foreign images.

21. The consensual role - Media rituals, for their prosperity, can exacerbate conflict.

22. Dissensus ritual - are ways of focusing the public’s attention on the existence of

social crises, even of escalating such crises.

23. Ritualizing a conflict - formulating it on a symbolic register, to diminish its

conflictual nature.

24. Paradigm of imagination - is a trend in media studies which emphasize the

importance of the cognitive instruments that allow us to conceive the society in which we

live in, to build images of the society. Imagination here is used with the following

meaning: “generating an image of”.

25. The problem of imagination - Benedict Anderson7 argues that imagination is capable

of acting on reality, of bending, of transforming it. For him, the imagination is first of all

a “prefiguration” process; an imaginary community can prefigure an actual community.

26. Mechanical reproduction - plays an essential part in Anderson’s process of

imagination, taking the form of the printing press or, more precisely, a “capitalism of

print”, capable of producing and disseminating newspapers and novels.

27. Technologies of imagination - also makes it possible to figure already existing

communities, to confirm their existence.

28. Process of “Casting” - The media is continuously reciting lists of roles available in

society. They constantly present the actors charged with playing these roles. On the other

hand, the Casting tells something about the actors and the parts they fill. Castings may

contradict each other, but they usually repeat, confirm and add up to each other in

6 Arjun Appadurai (1996). Modernity at large. London: University of Minnesota Press. 7 Benedict Anderson (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.

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offering a demographic general picture of society, of the groups that compose it and of

the characteristic of the groups.

29. Reconfiguration - There is an additional role that the media might play. This role does

not consist in prefiguring a society on the verge of being born or in figuring an already

existing society, but in reconfiguring a given society, in transforming it, retouching its

face.

30. The effects of an event - was believed to be only posterior and exterior to the event.

The main effect of an event consists of the event taking place, realizing its ritual

vocation, being attended to and becoming “deep play” benefiting from “felicity”

according to Austin8.

31. The success of an event - is made possible by a consensus among the organizers,

translated into a clear proposition. It allows a community to feel itself, to see itself,

measure itself, and to become aware of its own power. The success of an event is its

illocutionary effect. It allows a group to self imagine.

8 J.L. Austin (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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