Media events or media stories?

Abstract

Taking Dayan and Katz’s argument of media event as the point of departure, I want to not only assess the relevance of media event theory to a non liberal-democratic media system such as China but, more importantly, to argue that ‘media events’ need to be studied in juxtaposition to what I refer to as ‘media stories’ in order to yield insight into the complexity and ambiguity of the Chinese mediasphere. I show that whereas media events are about spectacles, official time and grand history, media stories are mostly about everyday life, unofficial time and individual memory. I argue that the co-existence of conflicting temporalities between the official media and commercial media contributes to a process of fragmentation and dispersal of a sense of national space and time. I further argue that although media events and media stories perform different spatial-temporal duties and functions in the way in which the nation is imagined, there is a complicity between nationalist discourses and transnational processes in contemporary China.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.