Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Figures -- Preface -- 1 Mediating Death -- 2 A Brief History of an Idea -- 3 The Event of Death -- 4 Rethinking Mourning Rituals -- 5 Ritual Contestations -- 6 Rituals Connect and Separate -- 7 The Quest for Post-Mortality -- Bibliography -- Index.

AbstractThe purpose of the article Mediatized ritual – Expanding the field in the study of media and ritual is to identify the key debates in present‐day scholarship on media and ritual and bring them into dialogue with current theorizing on the mediatization of society and culture. The article consists of three parts. The first presents a short outline of the study of media and ritual in modern life. The second discusses the idea of mediatized ritual as an evolving concept in the field. The third provides an empirical illustration of the mediatization of ritual by applying the concept to the analysis of the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013). In conclusion, it is argued that to study mediatized rituals in today's society is to face the theoretical and empirical challenge of engaging the two social realms of ritual and media in a close interplay. This intellectual venture changes our understanding not only of rituals and media (what they are and what they do) but also of society. This said, to study mediatized rituals is, in fact, to study society in action.

This article explores what digital media ethnography as a methodological approach can offer to the study of contiguous media events with an unexpected, violent and fluid nature. Emphasising the role of media events in the present organisation of social life, we as digital media anthropologists acknowledge the tendency in the current digital media environment to eventise and spectacularise social life. This development serves the power-related purposes of attention seeking and public recognition in the digital world. The article is structured as follows: first, we provide a brief outline of the field of digital media ethnography in relation to the study of media event; second, we identify what we claim are three key methodological dilemmas in applying digital media ethnography to the study of today's digitally circulating media events (scale, mobility and agency) and reflect on them in the context of our methodological positioning; third, we conclude this article by considering some epistemological and ontological implications of this methodological endeavour in relation to what can be called the 'meta-field' and the related instability in current digital research.

In today's world of networked, mobile, and global digital communication, Muslim martyrdom as a multi-layered communicative practice has experienced a new type of media saturation, thereby posing a challenge for the study of media, religion, and culture in a digital age. In this article, the analysis focuses on two cases of high symbolic relevance for the events later referred to as the "Arab Spring"—the deaths of a Tunisian fruit seller Mohammed Bouazizi and a young Egyptian man Khaled Saeed. Special focus is given to the discussion of digital solidarities and their construction in circulation and remediation of martyr narratives of Bouazizi and Saeed in diverse media contexts. In this global development of digital solidarities, we identify two categories of martyr images of particular relevance—a "living martyr" and a "tortured martyr"—and discuss their resonance with different historical, religious, cultural, and political frames of interpretation. In conclusion, we reflect on the question of the ethics of global mediation of Muslim martyrdom and its implications for the study field of media, religion, and culture in its digital state.

Artikkeli käsittelee Jokelan ja Kauhajoen koulusurmia kommunikatiivisina ja mediakulttuurisina ilmiöinä. Kirjoittajat analysoivat, miten media, erityisesti verkko, erilaisissa kommunikatiivisissa käytännöissään järjesti ja uudelleen organisoi koulusurmien hajottamaa mediakulttuurista järjestystä ja muokkasi tapahtumista mediakatastrofin. Verkkoaineistoa analysoidaan klassisen kommunikaatioteoreettisen jäsennyksen avulla kolmen toisiinsa limittyvän luennan kautta. Aineistoa tulkitaan sanomien siirtona ja leviämisenä sekä yhteisyyden rakentamisena. Kirjoittajat esittävät, että viestien kierrättäminen verkossa on Jokelan ja Kauhajoen koulusurmia kaikkein osuvimmin luonnehtiva kommunikaatiomuoto. Viestit välittyvät ja ritualisoituvat verkkoyhteisöissä juuri kierrätyksen ansioista ja sen seurauksena. Mediakatastrofin ytimessä on viestien syklinen kierto verkossa. Jatkuva surma-aineistojen kierrätys ruokkii ympäristöissään pelkoa ja epävarmuutta. Koulusurmat ovat osa pelon kulttuuria; manifestaatio ja reaktio sitä vastaan.

This book analyses the global (media) cultural phenomenon of school shootings in the context of mediatization in contemporary social and cultural life. It explores shootings from different, interconnected perspectives with a focus on the theoretical aspect, the practices of mediatization and an examination of the audiences, victims and witnesses

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. ; Peer reviewed

Abstract
The updating of media event theory for the digital age has been underway for some time, and several researchers have pointed out that the complexity of the hybrid media environment poses a challenge when it comes to understanding how media events in the present digital context ritually create belonging. In this article, we examine violent media events as hybrid phenomena and discuss their ritual workings in the present digital media environment. We apply what we call the 5 A's – actors, affordances, attention, affect, and acceleration – as key analytical tools to empirically study such events. We also develop the concept of hybridity in relation to media events by proposing three auxiliary A's: assemblage, amplification, and accumulation. Building on our earlier work, we call for more analytical consideration of the ambivalences in the ritual constructions of belonging (and non-belonging) in such violent events. We use the Christchurch massacre of 2019 as a case study to illustrate these conceptual developments.

This article sheds theoretical and empirical light on the ritual media events constructed around the deaths of three Cold War political leaders in the 1980s: the Finnish president, Urho Kekkonen (1900–1986), the Swedish prime minister, Olof Palme (1927–1986), and the Soviet Union general secretary, Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982). Investigating news articles published in the first days after the news of each death broke, as well as news articles on the funeral for each and the immediate aftermath, this study utilises historical news television and print media material, obtained from the national and media archives in Finland, Sweden and Russia. By bringing the study of media culture and history into a dialogue shared with anthropology and political history, this article produces new knowledge on the workings and outcomes of ritual media events in the context of Cold War history. The article places special emphasis on Victor Turner's ritual analysis and the ways in which power was symbolically transformed in these societies with different political and ideological histories. ; Peer reviewed

In this article, the authors examine the intensification of liveness and its effects in the Charlie Hebdo attacks that took place in Paris in January 2015. In their investigation they first re-visit the existing theoretical literature on media, event and time, and discuss in particular the relationship between media events and the idea of liveness. They then move on to the empirical analysis of the Charlie Hebdo attacks and demonstrate the aspects of intensified liveness in the circulation of selected tweets. The analysis is based on a multi-method approach developed for the empirical study of hybrid media events. In conclusion, the authors argue that the liveness, experienced and carried out simultaneously on multiple platforms, favours stereotypical and immediate interpretations when it comes to making sense of the incidents unfolding before the eyes of global audiences. In this condition, incidents are interpreted 'en direct', but within the framework of older mnemonic schemes and mythologization of certain positions (e.g. victims, villains, heroes) in the narrative. This condition, they claim, further accelerates the conflict between the different participants that took part in the event.

This introductory review article develops an analytic-conceptual distinction between spectacular, ordinary and contested facets of the present-day digitized urban condition. We reject a scholarly techno-optimism versus techno-pessimism dichotomy and argue that this triadic conceptualization can pave the way for a better understanding of the multiple, often contradictory and unpredictable implications of the fast-proceeding digitalization on cities and people who inhabit them. First, we discuss the intensified spectacularization from the perspective of labeling of cities as technologically advanced "smart" spaces and endeavors to enhance the attractiveness and ICT-glamour of urban public spaces. Next, we highlight two acute "ordinary sides" of living in digitally-mediated cities: the contributions of code-based software and digital media infrastructures to the routinized practices of urban life, and the escalation of the perceived standards of what constitutes "the ordinary" in the face of rapid technological change. Thirdly, we shed light on attempts at re-igniting street-level political agency, and the creation of outside-the-mainstream public spheres, via the aid of digital technology. In the end of the article, we consider how variable spectacular, ordinary and contested facets of the media city are co-present in the following articles of this Special Issue.