The most intense hopes and fears of our collective lives centre around
large-scale events - from competitions, celebrations and festivals to
environmental disasters, pandemics and terror attacks. The media are a
crucial part of this process: they enable the planning, resource
allocation and circulation of the vital information needed to mount
major events. They are also where traces of events are stored for
history. In short, large-scale and collective events have been, and
still are, mediated.
Starting from nineteenth-century industrialisation, Media and Events in
History explains how contemporary life has become saturated with
events. It discusses how they have come to involve extensive
infrastructures, forms of control and anticipation, attention and
participation, contingency and transformation, and articulations of the
past and the future. Synthesising and developing insights from history,
media studies, philosophy and the social sciences, Ytreberg surveys the
rise of event-planning via mediation, and exposes the historical driving
forces behind 'media events', global 'mega-events' and 'pseudo-events'.
Revealing the importance of events in history, this eye-opening book
will be of interest to students of media studies, history, historical
sociology and cultural history, as well as the general reader.
