Conferinţa profesorului Eric Rothenbuhler

Marti 24 noiembrie sala 614, ora 17,30 profesorul Eric Rothenbuhler va sustine o prelegere cu tema “Media Events in the Age of Terrorism and the Internet”.

Since the publication of Dayan and Katz’s (1992) Media Events, several scholars have proposed expanding the model to give more attention to conflict, breaking news, and other forms of political change. Katz himself seems recently to have agreed, suggesting in an essay with Liebes that the era of consensual media events has faded and may have passed, replaced by increasingly frequent and compelling though disruptive broadcasting marathons of disaster, terror, and war (Katz & Liebes, 2007).

The argument is not purely historical, though, and also involves a partly implicit conceptual shift from “ceremonial television” to “the live broadcasting of history.” I offer an alternative proposal, conceiving ceremonial television as one example of the larger paradigm of ritual communication.

Then that larger paradigm can be used to explain both integrative media events and the media role in disruptive events such as terrorist attacks. The argument will be illustrated with materials drawn from US media coverage of 9/11 and the Obama Inaugural.