Taxonomic Confusion: When classification and analysis ruin culture and media

Media events have been at the forefront of the way we consume culture, society, politics, and religion in the 21st century. It has become an unmovable staple of the agency we have given the ecosystem of news cycle, cultural production, entertainment exposure, and political life. It is, undoubtedly, the single most important prism with which we measure the success, failure, or impact of any given event. Of course, this, as anything, did not happen in a vacuum. There has been a systematic construction of theories, backgrounds, necessities, and demands, that have allowed for the classification and amplification of media events to play a convoluted role in our modern understanding and relationship with these phenomena. This has fertilized the ground for myriad of analyses (some more relevant than others) that often contradict, nullify, override, or complement each other. It puts the whole system in check, constantly, because, even when we hark back to early theorists, academics, and analysts, we encounter ideas that often run their course quite quickly. Media and culture, as spaces shaped and directed by technological advances, tend to morph and change in a rapid manner, rendering obsolete the ideas that we erroneously still consider relevant.

Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz wax poetic about the weight of media events in their aptly, but broadly titled, book Media Events. They converse, in a very matter-of-fact way, about the television and broadcast power in the shaping of modern media events in the world (but really, mostly in the U.S.). At the onset, Dayan and Katz seem to have an interesting grip on what it means for the media to shape a national identity, though they sin on being overly romantic about the prospect. They state,

“[...] democratic societies must be authenticated by professional and independent broadcasters. It is up to the broadcasters, not just to establishments and audiences, which ceremonies qualify for media-events treatment. This responsibility is a form of protection against establishment predilection for a ceremonial politics.” (ix)

Being that as it may, Dayan and Katz asume two, now erroneous, notions. One, that a professional broadcaster is somehow different from an independent one, or that somehow they hold the same amount of sway. Second, that broadcasters have an equally powerful seat at the table as politicians and audiences. Audiences have far less say in 2018 about what they consume than the illusion of choice that we have created. The establishment, on the other hand, still has far more weight in shaping national discourse and identity than broadcasters. If anything, the mediascape that informs us now, is more of an echo of political division than a construction towards a more decent, objective, and equilibrated debate.

Audiences seem to be at the mercy of these considerations and power struggles. Dayan and Katz put as examples the construction in narratives from the media such as: royal weddings as Cinderella stories, the moon landing as new frontiers, or the papal visits as diplomacy (12), but these too center around a prefabricated narrative that supposes the audiences, but does not include it. In other words, the audience becomes a tool to the narrative, a conduit. This, as far as we can see, has not changed. The illusion of choice might be greater (i.e. more media outlets, more options) but the reality is that the illusion has merely been atomized. Dayan and Katz, are of course, privy to this, albeit from a more broadcast minded position:

“the media have power to not only insert messages into social networks but to create the networks themselves–to atomize, to integrate, or otherwise to design social structure–at least momentarily.” (15).

Despite this being a run-of-the-mill thought, it does signal to one interesting trait of media construction: temporality. When seen as a somewhat bifurcated term, temporality proves to be a very interesting classification for media events. Most happen in the present, some dwell in a promise– in the future– others analyse what has happened.

A good example of the effect of this temporality, is the “post-debate media spin” (3) that Lydia Saad mentions in her article “Presidential Debates Rarely Game-Changers”. She mentions this in the context of the Bush v Gore presidential debates. The importance of the argument lays in tempering with the classification of temporality in order to suit a stretched out production of ideas. It stands to reason, then, that a presidential debate, for example, cannot just be merely a one-off event. It must be swollen into a pre and post event. This, then, paves the way for the like of media spin and manipulation to become instilled into the core narrative of media events. Precisely because of our pervasive idea of the perennial-event, we have set up an entire ecosystem that demands being fed constant information. This allows, and in fact celebrates, contradictory and superfluous ideas.

The confusion in the taxonomic approach to media event and spectacle analyses, comes, in part, from that very creation of the spectacularized everything. Let us not forget that the different iterations of technological advances have edged us closer to a barrage of content that seem to arrest every waking second of the consumer and that media always travels and is resilient and adaptive. Moreover, this is coupled with an even bigger confusion about the global idea of media events, over the national (U.S.) idea, which blurs even further any conceptualization that can easily fit a global mold. Julia Sonnevend in her essay “The Lasting Charm of Media Events”, point this criticism towards Dayan and Katz’s book,

“The problems with this concept of space do not stem from the fact that Dayan and Katz failed to consider globalization; they did, after all, pay attention to what they called ‘world communication’. But they mostly looked at both the global and the national as single and unified interpretive spaces.” (123)

The problem with the unification of concepts, is that it grossly overlooks the way spectacle and media is consumed throughout the world. For example, the idea of a unified, mediafied, presidential debate, is not something that is observed in many countries in the world. Neither is it routinely having three/four hour broadcast events (e.g. Grammys, Oscars, Super Bowl, etc) that lends itself to form a sort of social coalescent bond around the media. In fact, Dayan and Katz call this the “norm of viewing” (13), in which societies form cliques around the rules of how to gather and experience these media events. These norms of viewing are very much absent in many other cultures which asume media events as de rigueur entertainment and information (presidential elections, maybe a reality or two, etc) and not as society forming events and mandatory gatherings.

In A. Brad Schwartz’s Broadcast Hysteria, which deep dives into the real consequences of Orson Welles’ now infamous radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, the trouble with media classification is very well exemplified. By creating an imaginary hysteria, the printed media was able to portray the then nascent radio industry, as a medium ripe for fakery and manipulation, when in fact, it was the printed media which was using these very tactics. Dayan and Katz will say that “reality is uprooted by media events” (17), and this might very well be, but what happens when the lines become blurred? Which one is, then, affecting the other? Which one holds more sway over the political economy theory of media events? The very idea that media events have the capability of uprooting reality, creates a very dangerous imbalance in the way we can effectively and openly dialogue with what we consume and how we consume it.

Trying to constantly break down, group, and atomize theories about media events, presupposes an intrinsic bias: that they have become such fundamental part of our daily diet, that any change to the formula can send into haywire the way we fundamentally think and perceive media, thus rendering useless previous ruminations on the matter. This obligates us to either be constantly updating existing theories–which might end up obscuring their initial goal–or rushing to create new ones almost in real-time–which undermines the careful and patient essence of research.

Temporality, technology, and globality might gives us better tools to better form relevant analyses that takes into consideration, not only the way the U.S. has grown into an inescapable forever-content machine, but also the way other cultures and countries are still consuming media in a wholly different way that seem to be at odds with modernity at large.

Works Cited

Dayan, Daniel, and Elihu Katz. Media Events: the Live Broadcasting of History. Harvard University Press, 1996.

Saad, Lydia. “Presidential Debates Rarely Game-Changers.” Gallup.com, 25 Sept. 2008, news.gallup.com/poll/110674/presidential-debates-rarely-gamechangers.aspx

Schwartz, A. Brad. Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News. Hill & Wang, 2016.

Sonnevend, Julia. “The Lasting Charm of Media Events.” Media, Culture & Society, vol. 40, no. 1, 2017, pp. 122–126., doi:10.1177/0163443717726013.