Media events: an afterword

Media, Culuture & Society, 2017

We argue that the concept 'media events' has renewed the relevance of many existing studies, sharpened the significance of other studies, and inspired a stream of research. We then review our work on media events in relation to the grand narratives of national interest and collective memory. To reinvigorate the conceptual viability of 'media events', we put forward four questions for consideration in the larger theoretical, technological, and globalized contexts.

Scope of the Course: The effects of media on the social, economic, political and cultural spheres of life have been increasing significantly since the nineteenth century. In fact, there is a curious overlap between the transformation of the public sphere and the rise of mass media. This course will examine the points of juncture between the public sphere and mass media at the intersection of capitalism, liberal democracy and patriarchy. More specifically, this course will investigate the concepts of the public and the private; the social and the intimate as well as the relationship between public morality, private morality and media; the 'public,' 'publicness' and communications; alternative publics and alternative media through the lenses of different theories of the public sphere. In this course, we will read The main questions this course will ask are: 1) What are the junction points between history and theory in the transformation of the public sphere and the rise of the mass media? 2) What are the (non-)normative implications of different theories of the public sphere on the understanding of media? 3) How can one conceptualize alternative mass media and social media in terms of public-private distinction? 4) What is the significance of public sphere in the mediation of human communication? Why? At the end of the term the students will have accumulated knowledge of the theories of public sphere with a historical perspective; acquired theoretical and methodological knowledge, which are required to assess the effect of the mass media in the construction, narrowing down, extension and transformation of the public sphere; and developed a critical perspective on the function of the mass media in the transformation of the distinction between the public and the private in late-capitalist societies. The course also aims to investigate the possibilities for revealing the immediacy of the connections between the " theoretical " and everyday experiences through communication. In this respect, the course will also offer a venue for a collaborative autoethnographic preliminary study that involves cooperative research agendas of the students and the lecturer. The collaborative study, which will center on the question of the differentiations in the way audience/readers understand and communicate through the public-private distinctions will evolve through three lines: 1. The students' and lecturer's daily notes about the weekly discussions on the theoretical approaches, covered in the course with a view to a. their daily experiences b. which media they use most frequently in conveying these experiences and how; 2. The students' and lecturer's interactive readings of and notes on the three films that will be watched throughout Fall 2016; 3. Discussions on cross-cutting reflections of ethnicity, gender, class and age on the way our subjective and cooperative readings on the public-private distinctions.

The Habermasian understanding of the public sphere, as explicated in his seminal work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962 in German, translated into English in 1989), is tied to a particular validation of ‘public’ as the ‘rational-critical’ discussion of personally disinterested people occupying the same public spaces. While those 18th century participants might have got their topics of conversation from the early forms of journalism in circulation, Habermas relies on their face-to-face discussion in physical spaces to construct his theory of the ‘public sphere’ and ‘public opinion’. In this study he excludes modern-day media as a space from his delineation of the public sphere because of their commercial, non-conversational and entertainment dimensions. However, in later commentary on this study (1974 and 1989), he qualifies saying “today newspapers and magazines, radio and TV are the media of the public sphere” (quoted by Eley 1992) thus modifying his position somewhat. His study has provoked both a normative understanding of how the media should operate in the public sphere, and a pessimism about whether the media do this task properly, given their modern-day features. In this paper I question the normative ideal, and the pessimistic conclusions about media operations, by drawing on other theorists to make more nuanced and complex the description of ‘the public sphere’ for today. I draw on Arendt for a larger understanding of the ‘social’ and the ‘intimate’; Fraser, Benhabib and Eley for their ideas about counter publics and Other participants. And, for a better understanding of the workings of media, on Thompson’s ideas of non-co-present publicness and ‘visibility’. I use Warner to understand the idea of public subjectivity and the desire to participate vicariously in public bodies through certain kinds of media genres. Finally, I attempt a description of what kind(s) of public sphere(s) and what kinds of media activities we see operating in our world today

Mass Communication and Society, 2018