Media events: On the experience of not being there

Abstract

The viewing of television is a kind of liminoid activity in which masses of people routinely-even ritualistically-disconnect themselves from their everyday concerns, enter into a protected `time out', and allow themselves to be transported symbolically elsewhere.' Ironically, this very domain has given rise to a set of interruptions of itself that border on the liminal . These are the live broadcasts of great events that transform individuated and stratified masses into the communitas of whole societies, riveting them not just to programs in general but to the very same broadcast ; transporting them not just elsewhere but to `the center' . The reference is not to the live broadcasts of spectacular news breaks . These have to do, primarily, with accidents : the attempt on the life of a Pope or a President, or the leak in the atomic plant at Three Mile Island . We refer, rather, to the live broadcasts of ceremonial occasions that are preplanned and well advertised . They offer the audience a participatory role and propose the reintegration of society. An example would be the Kennedy funeral, not the Kennedy assassination . They constitute a genre reserved for very special occasions, taking advantage of the ability of television technology to transmit words and pictures simultaneously and universally. It is with such occasions that this paper is concerned . Our research began with the coming of Sadat to Jerusalem in 1977 . Thrilled as we were, together with millions of others, we began to study the event as a case of media diplomacy, in which the media-television in particular-can be said to have made a difference (Katz, Dayan, Motyl, 1983) . We soon came to realize that Sadat's heroic visit has parallels in events such as the Pope's first voyage to Poland, or the moonlandings, or DeGaulle's symbolic liberation of Quebec. We then joined these events to others that have stirred a nation or the world: the funerals of Kennedy and Mountbatten, the Royal Wedding, the Olympics, the Watergate hearings, the presidential debates and so on . Obviously there cannot be a very large number of such events, for they would be self defeating . In pluralist societies, establishment groups of all kinds

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