CLOUD Disassembly RPI

In the mid to late 1800’s, traveling journalist became necessary for newspapers to satisfy the desire of communities for information during the Civil War. In order to obtain information, the journalists would have to travel to the news source, obtain the information, and then travel back.

By the late 19th century, the journalist no longer had to travel back to send the information; the telegraph allowed the information to be sent over large distances instantly. The seperation of the individual and the news was no longer seperated with time (space without time) and the Media Event was born.

In the mid and late 20th Century, the radio, television and early internet helped bring about a contious coverage of events (both news and media events). Instead of these events being viewed as singular points in time, they began to have depth in time.

By the early 21st century the way that media covered the event became variable. Coverage of the media event could be split into peices and intermixed, thus augmenting the sense of time of the Media Coverage. Another method has been to displace the coverage of the event closer to the individual; accomplished by outsourcing filming of the event to sources more local to the Media Event. This distorts the sense of both space and time.

Many of these models attempt to allow the individual to feel like they are a part of the Media Event, suggesting the absence of differenciation in space & time between the individual and the media event.

Most newsworthy events fall into two general catagories; News and Media Events.  News events are those events which can be represented as a set of information (the score was 5 to 4 in the Soccer game last night). These events can be represented as points in time. A media event is the coverage and narrative surrounding an occasion.

A Media event has particular identifiers as listed above. Events tend to fit in a 5 categories; Occasion of State, Contest, Heroic Mission, High Holiday, and the “occasion”. Of particular interest to the area of sports journalism is Contest and Heroic Mission.

With the growing ability for event coverage to effect the event itself, a third category should be introduced the, “Paradigmatic Media Event”. This category looks to the way that the viewer sees themsleves in relation to the media event as well as the the way that the reporter or journalist intereacts with the event. In particular, the way in which a particular media event is approached can be categorized as “High Ritual” or “High Drama”. The journalist can choose to look at a particular event with reverence and respect or investigate with reproach and scepticism. With this in mind, the effect that the ritualized or dramatized coverage has on a viewer  can be emotional, symbolic or both. This also effects the way in which the journalists and producers choose to report an event.

The Media Event as an Aparatus for Time and Space

The Media event can be conceptualized as a massive occasion in respect to both time and space. These events tend to revolve around news events ( a distiction to be made later) but are intensified through a period of speculation, coverage, and post event analysis. Sports journalism finds itself in the midst of the “media event” as an apparatus for effecting both time and space.

As this graphic illustrates, the media event is a significant part of the identity of an event. The individuals involved in the viewing and participation in the event are largely dislocated through space (specificly distance) and, in many cases, time ( this is a siginficant departure from previous interpretations of the Media event which speculate that it must be a live broadcast. Yet, the realm of the media event has not had a significant change since the use of broadcast delay as a means of sensoring (the Super Bowl is an example of this since the 2004 half time show with Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson) as well as time delay to account for time zone differences (NBC’s use of ‘plausably live’ editing during the 2000 Sydney Olympics).

In the absence of the ‘live transmission’ requirement for media events, the essential guidelines include: preplanned event, framed in time and space, featuring a heroic personality or group, having high dramatic or ritual significance, and the force of a social norm which makes viewing mandatory.

Yet the most important aspect of these occurances is the interaction with the viewer. The inclusion of the self (even seperated by time and space) creates a world network which can “transport us simultaneously to where the event is taking place”(Elihu Katz, “Media Events: The Sense of Occasion”).

Sports “… is essential to the globalizing structure of media organizations. Sports is a relatively cheap method for filling hours of television time and moves easily across cultural and linguistic borders,” (Nancy K. Rivenburgh, “The Olympic Games: Twenty-First Century Challenges as a Global Media Event”). Sport Events fit will as national and global Media Events because they do not depend on culturally or socially unique elements. As such, it sits well as a unifier accross these many cultures and societies. As it stands, some of the most infulencal global media events are sports: the Winter Olympics, Summer Olympics, The World Cup, the Americas Cup, etc.  The World Cup, for example receives viewerships numbering in the billions.