Hybrid Media Events

Johanna Sumiala, Katja Valaskivi, Minttu Tikka, Jukka Huhtamäki

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781787439160
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

What are hybrid media events? Who creates them and what kind of purpose do they serve in contemporary societies? This book addresses these questions by re-thinking media events in the contemporary digital media environment saturated by intensified circulation of radical violence. The empirical analyses draw on the investigation of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, in 2015 and the global responses those attacks stirred in the media audience.

This book provides a new way of thinking about the idea of the hybrid in global media events. The authors give special emphasis to the hybrid dynamics between the different actors, platforms and messages in such events, explaining how global news media, terrorists and political elites interact with ordinary media users in social media. It demonstrates how tweets such as "Je suis Charlie" circulate from one digital media platform to another and what kind of belongings are created in those circulations during the times of distraction. In addition, the book examines how emotions, speed of communication and fight for attention become hybridized in the digital media. All these aspects, the authors argue, shape the ways in which we make sense of global media events in the present digital age.

The authors invite readers to critically reflect the technological, economical, political and socio-cultural challenges connected with today's global media events and the ethical encounters they may entail.

Chapter 1

What Are Hybrid Media Events of Terrorist Violence?

1.1. Why Do the Charlie Hebdo Attacks Matter?

On 7 January 2015, Paris and the rest of the Western world was holding its breath, following every movement in a manhunt launched after a terrorist attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Twelve people had been killed at the newspaper’s offices. The terror attack that was carried out by the Kouachi brothers, who were later shot and killed in a police raid, received massive media interest and sparked an instant global media event. The news circulated in the local, national and international news media and on social networking sites. Symbols of public mourning and messages of solidarity, but also of fear, hate and anger, travelled at high speed from one actor and media platform to another (see also Zagato, 2015; Sumiala, 2017).

While the global media was following and reporting the unfolding events, it also felt the need to try to make sense of what was happening, to offer some explanation. On 8 January, the American internet news service Kicker — which promises to ‘explain top stories in a super helpful, super engaging, super empowering way’ — provided a five-point list under the title ‘5 Reasons Why the Charlie Hebdo Massacre in France Matters to Everyone in the Free World’. These reasons were (Kicker, 2015)¹:

1. Free speech is a human right, but some intensely dispute that.
2. It forces us to think about the possible limits of free speech.
3. There is a connection between extremist Islam and violence as a retaliation tactic.
4. This is part of a string of similar attacks.
5. It might feed anti-immigrant feelings in Europe.

Each of these reasons was illustrated with numerous examples of texts, images and memes that circulated in the social media in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. The explanations and their illustrations were focused on the political and social implications of the attacks. At the same time, the piece was a media text that circulated other media texts, a representation referring to other representations in an attempt to illustrate what had happened and why that had significance. Although perhaps unusually reflexive, the piece was otherwise just another addition to an endless stream of media texts that were trying to make sense of the media event and its consequences. As such it was closely involved in the reproduction and circulation of the event, although it failed to recognize its own role in the causation and interpretation of the event. Furthermore, the piece was grounded in a framework where the world is seen as being divided into the Free World and the rest, a threatening place that questions the values of what it means to be ‘free’.

In this book, we set out to explore how the media are involved and intertwined with a global event of terrorist violence, and to identify which dimensions of the hybrid media environment play a part in the ensuing social imaginaries and symbolic battles. As a first step in this effort, the Kicker example above serves to illustrate just how involved and intertwined the media are, not only in the Charlie Hebdo attacks, but in the process of making sense of the event.

In the hybrid media system (Chadwick, 2013), the practices of professional, journalistic and social media are closely interwoven. Lines between production and consumption are blurred, and meanings are formed in an endless circulation of texts, visuals and meanings. The internet revenue model is based on the attention economy (Davenport & Beck, 2001; Goldhaber, 1997; see also Webster, 2014), that is the success of professional media companies depends on the number of clicks and shares their stories receive. Algorithms are also used to determine which types of contents are circulated to particular audiences. This circulation takes place in the marketplace of attention (Webster, 2014), where audiences are active in creating and circulating content, but at the same time depend more and more on what social media platforms and their algorithms curate for their feed.

The effectiveness of terrorist attacks has always depended on the attention they manage to attract, and the amount of collective fear they manage to instil. Terrorism cannot be separated from communication, for without communication of terrorists’ messages the effect of terrorism would be significantly reduced (Archetti, 2012; Klopfenstein, 2007). Contemporary terrorism makes skilful use of the hybrid media environment in seeking attention. At the same time, the media manifold (Couldry, 2012; Couldry & Hepp, 2016) is so complex that no individual actor — terrorists included — can control circulation in a hybrid media event (Sumiala, Tikka, & Valaskivi, 2019; Sumiala, Tikka, Huhtamäki, & Valaskivi, 2016; Vaccari, Chadwick, & O’Loughlin, 2015).

In this book, we argue that the Charlie Hebdo attacks need to be understood as a global media event in a string of terrorist incidents since 9/11. In the past 15 years or so since the attacks on the World Trade Center, the media environment has changed significantly, as have ways of conceptualizing terrorism in association with radical Islam (Nacos, 2016). The 9/11 attacks and their aftermath have resulted in a world where an ambiguous fear of Muslim terrorism is used as political leverage to restrict and curtail citizens’ rights through surveillance and — paradoxically — constraints on freedom of speech (Cottle, 2006b). The aim of terrorism, which is to seek attention and instil fear, has not changed, and terrorism has — unfortunately — been quite successful in feeding into fear (Archetti, 2012). In other words, 9/11 provided a traumatic context for all those following violent acts of terror. Since then, the cultural imaginary of terrorism has mainly been framed in terms of Islam.

The circulation of affect makes a metonymic connection (Ahmed, 2004a, 2004b) between Islam and terrorism. That connection is now so strong that the initial reaction to any and every violent incident is to suspect Islamist terrorism (Nacos, 2016; see also Said, 1981/1997). It is not an uncommon observation that when the perpetrator is white and indigenous, the search for explanations focuses on individual personality traits and personal history, from upbringing and media usage to issues of mental health. But when the perpetrator is thought to be ‘an outsider’, it seems that references to cultural background and religion are explanations enough; there is no need to address individual reasons (cf. Khiabany & Williamson, 2012). For instance, in the wake of the Utøya massacre in Norway in 2011, politicians and the media in Northern Europe were quick to make comments that the perpetrator must be a Muslim. When it turned out that Anders Breivik was blond and blue-eyed and held extreme right political sympathies, the explanations shifted to his troubled childhood, absent father, bullying at school and, finally, distorted relationship with his mother (cf. Borchgrevink, 2013). By contrast, the Kouachi brothers, who were born in France and who grew up in deprived Parisian suburbs, were portrayed not as ‘boys of our own’ who had gone astray, but as external Muslim terrorists who had come into French society from the outside to carry out their cowardly attacks. In this way both Islam and the attackers were framed as outsiders to France, and to the West in general (Todd, 2015).

In this book, we argue that contemporary media events of terrorist violence play out in the ways they do because of the contemporary hybrid media environment. We do not mean to suggest that technological advances are the actual cause of these events, but rather that the practices, range and reach of consequences and circulated social imaginaries of a media event are always ingrained in the technologies available, and so provide particular affordances, narratives, modes of communication, genres and repertoires. The whole of our contemporary ‘social world is fundamentally interwoven with media’ (Couldry & Hepp, 2016, p. 16).

Our media environment today is largely the outcome of a process of technological development geared to creating new business opportunities through the internet. This (technological) business focus has had side-effects that are felt in societies throughout the world. These side-effects include the creation of polarizing ‘bubbles’ that are enhanced by social media algorithms, and those bubbles make possible the fabrication and spreading of lies and rumours for economic and political gain, as well as some features of datafication that contribute to increasing inequality (cf. Pariser, 2011). Methods of branding, propaganda and promotion are used by various actors, including terrorists. These tendencies obviously tie in with wider socio-historical, economic and political developments, and the aftermath of neoliberal global capitalism. In this book, however, we apply the lens of the media event.

1.2. Towards Interdisciplinary Analysis of Media and Terrorism

Contemporary terrorist violence is a complicated and shifting area of study and discussion that is extensively covered in a range of disciplines in the social and political sciences (see, e.g., Kepel, 2017; Roy, 2016). There is also a body of literature that addresses the role of (journalistic) media in terrorism (see, e.g., Altheide, 1987; Kavoori & Fraley, 2006). The role of media in terrorism has attracted academic research interest for decades. Much of this work has focused on the contents, meanings and frames of (journalistic) media in their coverage of terrorism, be it in newspapers or television (for more on the study of media and terrorism, see, e.g., Archetti, 2012; Nacos, 2016).

The aim of this book is to advance our understanding of the relationship between media and terrorism in the contemporary hybrid media environment where hybrid media events escalate, circulate and cumulate. Our approach is inspired by several intellectual sources, including media anthropology, international communication and political communication, and recent discussions on media and social theory. We hope to be able to produce a map of the territory of hybrid media events of terrorist violence and provide new insights into the dynamics of the present media environment, which would help people and societies better comprehend what is at stake in these conflicts rather than escalate them.

Our analysis of the unfolding of the Charlie Hebdo attacks as a hybrid media event applies an approach that views media events as ruptures big enough in the ordinary flow of occurrences to create new meanings. In this process, we revisit some of the earlier historical, philosophical and sociological theorizing on events and bring them into a new type of dialogue with the line of media events research first initiated by Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz in 1992. In this book, we argue for the necessity of looking more carefully into the interplay between the media environment and the dynamics of global imagination activated in a given context. We claim that understanding the hybridization of the present media environment is essential in order to grasp what is happening in today’s media events of terror and the global narratives that are told in those media-saturated events in the present digital age. But first, in order to set the framework for this book, we introduce and elaborate our understanding of two key concepts central to our analysis: hybrid and media event.

1.2.1. Hybrid

Although the concept of hybrid is enjoying current popularity in academic discourse, with numerous scholars in different fields expounding their ideas in relation to hybrid (see, e.g., AlSayyad, 2001; Smith & Leavy, 2009; Whatmore, 2002), the concept goes back quite some time. Roman statesman and philosopher Pliny the Elder (ad 79) used the concept to describe bizarre creatures from far and exotic lands, part animal and part-human (Chadwick, 2013, p. 8).

In the seventeenth century, the word was adopted to refer to mixed racial inheritance. At around the same time, it also assumed a more metaphorical meaning, referring to things that have different origins, or heterogeneous sources. In biological contexts, the concept is still used today to refer to cross-breeds between plants or animals; in computer technology to describe mixtures of digital and analogue technologies and in the automative industry to refer to cars that run on more than one source of power. All in all, ‘hybridity alerts us to the unusual things that happen when distinct entities come together to create something new that nevertheless has continuities with the old’ (Chadwick, 2013, p. 9). In social sciences, hybridity is an interdisciplinary trend that cuts across several fields. In organizational studies research, for instance, there is growing interest in ‘hybrid organizations’ (Billis, 2010). Andrew Chadwick notes that hybridity can be seen as ‘something like an ontology’, a theoretical disposition providing us with the opportunity to ask and answer new kinds of questions about ‘the nature of contemporary society’.

But the concept of hybridity does have its problems. Analysing hybridity is inherently difficult, as it implies the existence of pure baseline forms, before they are mixed and blended, and historically it has proved hard to find such forms. Following Edward Said, Marwan Kraidy refers to the concept of hybridity as ‘contrapuntal’, which he says is ‘well suited for understanding the relational aspects of hybridity because it stresses the formative role of exchanges between participating entities’ (Kraidy, 2005, p. 13).

Our aim in this book is to explore hybridity in the context of the contemporary media environment. To that end we have identified three writers — Marwan M. Kraidy (2005), Bruno Latour (1993) and Andrew Chadwick (2013) — whom we will be referring to in order to describe aspects of hybridity that can help us understand hybrid media events.²

Bruno Latour’s idea of hybridity is twofold, or rather two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, he talks about how the distinction between nature and culture/society in modern Western thinking is counterintuitive and counterproductive; on the other hand, he emphasizes the hybridity between human and non-human actors. In his famous book-length essay We Have Never Been Modern (1993), he calls for an anthropological approach to Western societies that sees beyond the distinctions between institutions in the modern West. Latour uses the media, and newspapers in particular, as an example of compartmentalization. His essay begins with a description of his wading through Le Monde, where the world is neatly separated into sections: science, politics, economy, law, religion, technology and fiction. Latour’s critique is focused not on the media, however, but on academic thinking. For him, the problem lies in different ‘fiefdoms of criticism’: epistemologists are all focused on facts and insist on the real; sociologists are obsessed with power and the collective and deconstructionalists are fixated on the constructed and discursive. His practical solution is the Actor Network Theory (ANT), which proposes to look at (hybrid) networks of actors, both human and non-human, in a seamless fabric of nature-culture — all actors that are at once real (like nature), narrated (like discourse) and collective (like society) (Latour, 1993, p. 6).

Marwan M. Kraidy (2005) takes a communicative perspective and discusses hybridity in the context of culture, international communication and media. Hybridity, he says, typically requires cross-cultural contact: it involves ‘the fusion of distinct forms, styles, or identities that span across national or cultural boundaries’. This contact can assume the form of either movement of cultural commodities, such as media programmes or exchange through the media, or movement of people. Both involve the transfer of ideas and practices, giving way to hybridization. But Kraidy’s approach extends beyond culture as he points out that present-day hybrid media are shaped by politico-economic considerations, in that ‘the pervasiveness of hybridity in some ways reflects the growing synchronization of world markets’ (Kraidy, 2005, p. 9). Furthermore, Kraidy notes that hybridity is fully compatible with globalization.

Both Latour and Kraidy place great weight on the question of culture. Latour (1993) talks about the relationship between the West and the non-West, while Kraidy criticizes the discursive, unhelpful division between ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’. Latour insists that it is the West that has separated nature from society, and that by viewing the two on a (hybrid) nature-culture continuum it would be possible for the West to undo the division of cultures. He suggests that if the division between nature and culture is no longer seen as an epistemological question, then the West could also be viewed through the anthropologist’s lens. This is very much taken for granted in contemporary anthropology, where it is just as ordinary and commonplace to study ‘our own’ societies as it is to explore ‘the other’. In recent years, media ethnographical approaches have particularly contributed to this line of inquiry (see, e.g., Rothenbuhler & Coman, 2005). Yet the cultural and symbolic division between us and them has certainly not disappeared.

Andrew Chadwick’s (2013) starting point is what Latour would call modernist: he works from the premise that hybridity is about blending institutional boundaries and roles. Chadwick is particularly interested in exploring the relationship between media (as in journalism) and politics. His approach derives from political communication, and he takes a special interest in elections. His analysis is firmly rooted in the Anglo-American context, and his concept of hybrid media system reflects this particular socio-geographic-historical context. In his own words, his aim is to ‘provide an empirically informed interpretive account of key aspects of systemic change in the political communication environments of Britain and the United States’, countries that have ‘what are now best characterized as hybrid media systems’ (Chadwick, 2013, p. 3). In this context, hybridity refers to the integrated roles that so-called older and newer media play in political communication in these two countries. Chadwick’s focus is to study systemic characteristics, particularly with a view to seeing how the logics of older and newer media practices intertwine and how newer media practices interpenetrate the practices of both the older media and politics.

As we can see, then, the concept of hybridity has been used in different ways in relation to media and communication. The epistemological premises of the three approaches discussed above differ to some degree, which obviously presents a challenge for combining them and using them together. Having said that, there are also important similarities and points in common. All three writers acknowledge the presence of hybridity in culture, and the presence of hybridity across different domains of society.

But our aim and purpose here is to take inspiration from each of these three writers and to apply their theories in ways that are relevant to our case, that is to global hybrid media events of terrorist violence. From Latour, we adopt the idea of hybridity between human and non-human actors, the seamless fabric of nature-culture that is manifested in our contemporary media environment that intertwines technology, human action and discourses. Kraidy provides us guidance when we discuss power relations in global hybrid culture and in the world of international communication and media, and imbalances caused by overly simplified views of the relationship between ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’. He also provides us with the tool of critical transculturalism, which allows us to focus on power in intercultural relations by integrating agency and structure into international communication analysis. Chadwick’s empirically grounded idea of the hybridity of the media system helps us gain an analytical view of our empirical data, which consists of hybrid materials from both older and newer media outlets. Having said that, we step back from Chadwick’s emphasis on old and new media logics and from the systemic approach, and use the concept of hybrid media environment instead of system. For us, environment more accurately refle...