“Je Suis Charlie” and the Digital Mediascape : The Politics of Death in the Charlie Hebdo Mourning Rituals

Peer reviewe

Mediated Muslim martyrdom : Rethinking digital solidarity in the “Arab Spring”

Peer reviewe

Introduction : Toward Hybrid Media Events of Terrorist Violence

This is an introdcution to a special section in the journal in which we examine terrorism as a media event. The introduction reviews the classic works by Elihu Katz and Daniel and adds our own contemporary extension of their theories. It acknowledges the significance of temporality and related mnemonic patterns (Zelizer, Kraidy, in this introduction); networked, relational territorialities (Kraidy, in this introduction); and the discursive politics applied to categorize the violence in question (Hervik; Cui and Rothenbuhler; Price, in this introduction), but it also suggests a more detailed focus on the hybrid dynamics between actors, platforms, and messages which circulate during violent media events. The authors continue the debate on the complex relationship between media, event, and terror by introducing hybridity as yet another angle to this topical discussion.Peer reviewe

“No More Apologies” : Violence as a Trigger for Public Controversy over Islam in the Digital Public Sphere

This article investigates how violence associated with religion, here namely Islam, functions as a trigger for public controversy in the Turku stabbings that took place in Finland in 2017. We begin by outlining the Lyotard-Habermas debate on controversy and compound this with current research on the digital public sphere. We combine cartography of controversy with digital media ethnography as methods of collecting data and discourse analysis for analysing the material. We investigate how the controversy triggered by violence is constructed around Islam in the public sphere of Twitter. We identify three discursive strategies connecting violence and Islam in the debates around the Turku stabbings: scapegoating, essentialisation, and racialisation. These respectively illustrate debates regarding blame for terrorism, the nature of Islam, and racialisation of terrorist violence and the Muslim Other. To conclude, we reflect on the ways in which the digital public sphere impacts Habermasian consensus- and Lyotardian dissensus-oriented argumentation.Peer reviewe

From Media Events to Expressive Events : An Interview with Daniel Dayan

In this interview, Professor Daniel Dayan provides a philosophical and theoretical reflection on the development of media event theory and its influence in media and communication studies since 1990s. He reveals the main theoretical premises and inspirations behind the theory and provides a thoughtful reflection of the historical situation in which the theory was developed. The latter part of the interview observes the present day terrorist violence in the framework of media event theory.Peer reviewe

News rituals of participation : Negotiating temporalities, categories, and hierarchies of news-making on YouTube

Peer reviewe

#JeSuisCharlie : Towards a Multi-Method Study of Hybrid Media Events

Peer reviewe

Deconstructing Immortality? : Identity work and the death of David Bowie in Digital Media

Peer reviewe