Paddy Scannell

Big Brother as a Television Event

Big Brotheris considered a made-for-television event. It is argued that events have the same structure as stories—a beginning, middle, and end—which corresponds to the structure of the human life span. Media events elicit talk. Gossip is treated as an intrinsic feature of Big Brother and, as formally indicative of the everyday, worldly involvements and enjoyments which the program was designed to evoke from its viewers.

The Dialectic of Time and Television

The article reviews the key question of the effects of television as proposed by Elihu Katz in his introduction and the various responses to it in the contributions to this volume. It argues that the question is a proper concern of sociology, engaged as it is with the politics of the present and immediate, short-term effects. The question of long-term effects, however, is beyond the scope of a social science methodology concerned with the impact of the new. Long-term effects only show up with the passing of time and are the concern of historical studies. As television begins to have a history, it begins to be possible to examine its historical record to try to tease out its long-term impact on the world—so far!

Television and History: Questioning the Archive

This essay raises the question of the status of TV recordings as historical documents. Although it is perfectly legitimate to read old programs from the 1950s onwards as historic evidence of their times, this says nothing about the contribution of television itself to the historical process. To be concerned with the effect of television itself on the general historical process, calls for a different approach: one that focuses not so much on the content of programs as on how they are made and with what available technical resources. This essay explores the status of TV (and radio) archives as academic historical resources through a brief analysis of microphones (radio), cameras (TV) and recording devices (for both).

Cultural studies: which paradigm?

This essay is a critical review of ‘Cultural Studies: two paradigms’ by Stuart Hall, published in this journal in 1980. The two paradigms are ‘experience’ and ‘ideology’, the respective master concepts of the first and second generation of Cultural Studies. I situate Hall’s article in the context of its time (the late 1970s) as a response to internal disagreements within British Marxism and, more broadly, to a crisis in the humanistic disciplines–notably English Literature and History. Hall, I conclude, privileges ideology over experience. I prefer the paradigm of ‘lived experience’ and, in the second part of this essay, offer a revaluation of its meaning and significance for media and cultural studies.

Back to the future: media and communication studies in the 21st century

It is ten years to the month since the last themed issue of this journal was published on the work of social memory (MCS, 2003, 25:1). We now resume the regular publication of themed issues with a special ‘bumper’ number that looks at the state of the field of media and communication studies at the start of this century. It seemed appropriate to do this by looking backwards and forwards: back to where we began, forwards to what lies ahead. Themed issues were a defining feature of MCS in its first 20 years – partly of necessity. We reluctantly abandoned them when the rate of acceptance for non-commissioned articles submitted to the journal had grown so much that they squeezed themed numbers out in order to ensure their publication within reasonable time from acceptance. But to begin with there was no flow of copy from our readership (it did not exist at first; it had to be built, incrementally, through the years) and it fell to the editorial board to generate the journal’s content. We did so, for the first 20 years, often through commissioned articles on themed issues, the identification of which was a key editorial task in the journal’s formative years. It was a way of keeping up with current work in the study of media and of trying to point the way forward by identifying emergent topics of enquiry and research. To re-launch themed numbers the present editorial board has looked back and tried to identify some topics that have been central to the journal’s self-definition and sustained through the years as recurring concerns. After lively discussion we came up with three: identities, globalization and the public sphere. All have been long-running interests for the journal and our readership. We invited guest editors to develop these themes for us and all our contributors were asked to write shorter, more reflective articles, in conversation with each other, rather than the standard length, stand-alone academic articles that we routinely publish. We wanted to take a moment’s pause to reflect on the ongoing life of the journal and take stock of where have we come from, where are we now and where are going. So where are we now – the journal, the field and its academic community? To answer this we must look back to get some measure of the distance travelled and the

Personal Influence and the End of the Masses

This article offers an exogenous historical analysis of Personal Influence, arguing that it offers an engaged response to a fundamental change taking place at that time in the world economy as it moved from scarcity to abundance. The ten year delay in the publication of the book after the original field work was done in Decatur, Illinois, in 1945 suggests that the sociology of mass communication had difficulty in making sense of the data that work produced. It needed the new sociology of interpersonal communication to interpret it. In accounting for the fusion of these two different sociologies in the work that was finally published, this article indicates the passing of the time of the masses and the coming of the time of everyday life.

Media and religion

There are two possible ways of presenting this themed issue: the media ... and religion, or religion ... and the media. We have ‘naturally’ preferred to privilege media as the first term with which to frame the topic, and we start from a socio-cultural perspective on the question of religion. Mediatization theory is a hot topic at the moment and has been much debated in recent issues of this journal. It serves as a useful entry-point into the relationship between the media and religion. In one influential account of this contested term, mediatization is a phenomenon of late 20th-century modernity and is primarily concerned with the impact and effect of the media system (the daily press and broadcasting services) as a central social institution on other key contemporary social institutions (e.g. politics and sport). Stig Hjarvard, the leading proponent of this approach, has examined religion from this perspective and provides a framework for its discussion by the other participants in the panel on the mediatization of religion which opens up this special themed issue.1 The context of this discussion is particular: all contributors are from northern Europe where Lutheranism is the dominant national religious church. The issues addressed, however, go well beyond this region and its particular institutionalized forms of religion. The conventional wisdom that religion is in decline, in Europe at least, undermined by a long historic trend toward the secularization of modern societies, is increasingly debatable, as Hjarvard acknowledges. But it is for sure, he argues, that the media are themselves modern, worldly, secular institutions whose overall impact has played a part in that decline. What percolates through the media is a diffuse representation of what, with a nod to Michael Billig’s concept of banal nationalism, Hjarvard calls banal religion. Not meant as a pejorative term, banal religiosity shows up in countless narratives about angels, demons, the supernatural, and the afterlife which circulate in TV dramas, movies, and best-seller popular novels of which The Da Vinci Code is exemplary. The leakage of the authority of the traditional churches stands in contrast with a diffuse spiritual sensibility in modern societies, the evidence for which is pervasively present in everyday popular culture.

Media events: an afterword

I mean no disrespect to our illustrious authors if I start by pointing out that they do not own their topic. The originality and genius of Dayan and Katz lie in having identified media events as a topic for serious academic study and, crucially, gaining recognition for and acknowledgment of it. The topic is one thing: its interpretation and analysis is another. The latter is what authors own, not the former. In what follows, I will focus primarily on the topic itself and its enduring relevance and significance for the field of media and communication studies. That it continues to matter is at least in part affirmed by the degree of attention it has received in this journal over the past 25 years. ‘Media events’ is probably the single most discussed and referenced topic in Media, Culture and Society in recent years. I have done a quick search on a few other topics which came to prominence in MCS at around the same time (the start of the 1990s) that might challenge this claim. So, for instance, ‘globalization’, an emerging key topic of that decade, shows up in the journal’s search engine with a total of 455 references, 273 of which are in original articles. The ‘public sphere’ yields a total of 688 references, 448 of them in full-length articles. Both are linked to media events, but it is well ahead with 935 references (621 in full-length articles) across pretty much the same period. These figures go back to the start of the journal in 1979. When Peter Lunt and Livingstone (2013) surveyed the presence of the concept of the public sphere in MCS 5 years ago, they found that it had only a sprinkling of article references (21) before the appearance, in English, of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1989. Through the 1990s, there were 58. The real take-off of interest came in the first decade of the new millennium with 247 references – a growth stimulated, they suggested, by globalization and the rise of the Internet. With ‘media events’, we find 114 article references before the publication in 1992 of the book by Dayan and Katz. David Chaney’s MCS article in 1983, for instance, covered the same phenomenon just as Dayan and Katz were getting their teeth into it. Chaney examined three post-war British festivals: the Victory Parade of 1946, the Festival of Britain 1951, and the Coronation of 1953. He too was concerned with broadcast (radio and television) coverage of ‘actual events in the ritual forms of ceremonial festivals’

Regenerating Stuart Hall

ABSTRACT In this personal essay I remember Stuart Hall and evaluate his contribution to the foundation of Cultural Studies. Some of his best-known written work comes out of the teacher–student interaction in the working environment of the seminar and classroom. Hall was a great teacher who inspired his students. This, I suggest, is the basis of his renown as a seminal figure in the emergence of Cultural Studies as the global field of inquiry that it is today.

Reality Television and Arab Politics: Contention in Public Life, by Marwan Kraidy

might be useful beyond the academic context while simultaneously maintaining a critical cautiousness. Although Image Bite Politics offers an impressively detailed research program, the very nature of visual information research demonstrates that challenges exist when trying to examine visual texts, and some of these prove difficult to overcome. For example, it is difficult to delineate in some cases what information is purely visual versus what information is purely aural, and the researchers do not offer a framework for evaluating how visual bites and sound bites together constitute a deeper meaning for political audiences. Additionally, this research does not allow us to conclude whether visual information impacts the outcome of elections. In Chapter 6, the authors go to great lengths showing that there is some relationship between positive visual portrayals of candidates and the likelihood that voters will support those candidates. However, as this correlational analysis uses polling data that do not reflect how much or what type of visual information was consumed, we still cannot conclude how exactly visual portrayals implicate election outcomes. Grabe and Bucy are correct, however, when they suggest that future research should be directed toward these ends. In sum, Image Bite Politics should be added to the reading list of any media or political communication scholar. The book’s comprehensive and historically oriented literature review, its in-depth content-analytic research, and its new and fascinating findings all contribute to a blossoming research area within political communication scholarship. This, coupled with an extremely accessible writing style, demonstrates Grabe and Bucy’s ability to masterfully present compelling research that is useful to communication scholars and political scientists alike.