Media and Events in History

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.