Lecture 1: What is an event?

- We are immersed in an age of information, where access to information is up to date, instant and easily accessible. We are surrounded by it all the time.
-Keeping in mind the keywords such as time/accelaration/quantity/quality/space
-Is our world getting smaller?

But what is an event?
-Something that affects people
-Something staged to generate publicity
-Something that interrupts the day to day life of people.

How do we identify media events? - ref: News of the World: Goodbye Issue
-Media events are created by the media for the media
-Not conspirisy theories
-Creates publicity
-Planned/organised/staged/expected/anticipated e.g: sports events/anniversarys/birthdays.

Jean Baudrillard:
-A theorist who stated that we no longer have 'real events' and we live in a world which is going round in perpetual motion with nothing to look forward to.
-All events have been recycled and have been done before.
-But after 9/11 occurred, Jean Baudrillard  had a shift of thought, he now said that we are living in the 'Hell of Power' and a world where health and safety and prevention of all kinds of measures are being taken place to try to prevent natural events happening.

Non Events:
-These so-called 'events' represent media which has now fallen under the category of events, yet does not really fit the criteria of an event.

-The non-event is not when nothing happens. It is, rather, the realm of perpetual change, of a ceaseless updating, of an incessant succession in real time, which pro­duces this general equivalence, this indifference, this banality that characterizes the zero degree of the event.

Questions for further discussion:

•Are all events manipulated, controlled, policed and turned into non-events?

•Are all events predictable?

•Are all events crises, malfunctions, accidents, pseudo-events, staged dramas…etc?

•Which “events” never get reported or are not “covered”?

•How do audiences, prosumers, social media users redefine events?