The Popes visit to Reunion - Media Event By Daniel Dayan

Terms and definitions within the article: 1. Event - The concept of event is ambiguous, it often refers to several types of realities. These realities are distinct, but they all are linked to the universe of meaning and all beg access to narratives. Paddy Scannell1 describes events as happenings, as things that occur, things to which we try to ascribe meaning. 2. Making sense of - is a matter of journalism and often consists of finding someone responsible for what happened. Without becoming understandable, the event enters the world of meaning-ness, of things that can be explained. 3. Expressive events - are discursive acts and sometimes are difficult to identify who actually speaks. 4. Television - is more than a witness to the event; it is one its essential players. The television of expressive events, of occasions is analyzed by Elihu Katz and Daniel Dayan2 as Media Events. 5. Media Events - it can content itself with offering broadcasts about rituals, but it may be also capable of miming ritual phenomena, thus offering not only images, but equivalents of rituals. Certain media events are not simply televised ceremonies, i.e. ceremonies whose images happen to be in mass circulation. 6. Ritualization - affects the very performance and reception of television, and TV ritualization easily coexists with the initial one. 7. The ritual universe - has developed a dimension that had previously been excluded, such as distance between celebration and participation. One may speak of rituals without physical contact, of rituals to be reconstructed at home. 8. Criteria of validation - are quite different when happenings are involved. They concern newsworthiness, reliability of information and when symbolic events are involved. 9. Modes of discourses - Gestures are particularly fragile and vulnerable to criticism. Gestures can be momentous or they can remain mere gesticulations.
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Paddy Scannell. (2000). For anyone-as someone-structures. Media, Culture and Society. 22, 5-24. Daniel Dayan & Elihu Katz (1992). Media events: The live broadcasting of history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

10. Deep play and Shallow play - The two terms were coined by Clifford Geertz3 who answered to the question as to why some cockfights are important and some other are not; the answer he gave is that the importance resides from the identities of the cock owners. A fight means much more and stakes are higher when prominent personalities are involved. This difference between deep play and shallow play is a matter of validation. 11. Pseudo-events - are validated by no other than the media that broadcast them. 12. Center - is an institutionalized core of values and beliefs, they are constantly challenged by reformulating themselves, they are eminently constructed, and this constructedness does not contradict their reality. Clifford Geetz describes a center as an offer of meaning. It is defined by a capacity to represent, to illustrate a cosmic order. 13. Public sphere - is characterized by the nature of the ongoing debates. The diversity of accounts concerning the same event helped to underline the diversity of public spheres. 14. Link - Philip Schlesinger4 stressed the existence of an implicit link between the public sphere and the nation-state. 15. Public space of representation - is a concept coined by Habermas5 who describes it as a public sphere constructed by a center in view of exerting, maintaining or reestablishing its control. 16. The Churchs translation - is a ritual aimed at redistributing fragments of the relics of saints to the most remote communities of an expanding Catholicism. This ceremony is the ceremony of the Adventus or Advent. What television broadcast is an authentic advent. 17. Panegyrist - a person who is in charge of exalting the virtues of the visitor and the bringing out the meaning of the visit. This person may be compared with a modern world journalist says Daniel Dayan. 18. Discursive architecture - it juxtaposes several discourses, each of which has a specific author, a specific recipient, and a specific object.

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Clifford Geetz (1973). The interpretation of culture. New York: Basic Books. Philip Schlesinger (1996). Europeanization and the media: National identity and the public sphere. In T. Slatta (Ed.), Media and the transition of collective identities. (IMK Report Series No.18). Oslo, Norway: University of Oslo Press. 5 Habermas (1962). The structural transformation of the public sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press.

19. Diversity - Arjun Appadurai6 has attempted to describe diversity of contemporary societies so as to illustrate the basic heterogeneity of those societies. In describing them, he has used metaphors from landscape paintings, specifically the endings -scape. 20. Mediascape - The mass of images and information circulating from one end of the planet to another is organized into diverse media landscapes. These mediascapes are characterized by the amount and nature of the diversity they offer: by their hospitability to, or rejection of, foreign images. 21. The consensual role - Media rituals, for their prosperity, can exacerbate conflict. 22. Dissensus ritual - are ways of focusing the publics attention on the existence of social crises, even of escalating such crises. 23. Ritualizing a conflict - formulating it on a symbolic register, to diminish its conflictual nature. 24. Paradigm of imagination - is a trend in media studies which emphasize the importance of the cognitive instruments that allow us to conceive the society in which we live in, to build images of the society. Imagination here is used with the following meaning: generating an image of. 25. The problem of imagination - Benedict Anderson7 argues that imagination is capable of acting on reality, of bending, of transforming it. For him, the imagination is first of all a prefiguration process; an imaginary community can prefigure an actual community. 26. Mechanical reproduction - plays an essential part in Andersons process of imagination, taking the form of the printing press or, more precisely, a capitalism of print, capable of producing and disseminating newspapers and novels. 27. Technologies of imagination - also makes it possible to figure already existing communities, to confirm their existence. 28. Process of Casting - The media is continuously reciting lists of roles available in society. They constantly present the actors charged with playing these roles. On the other hand, the Casting tells something about the actors and the parts they fill. Castings may contradict each other, but they usually repeat, confirm and add up to each other in

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Arjun Appadurai (1996). Modernity at large. London: University of Minnesota Press. Benedict Anderson (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.

offering a demographic general picture of society, of the groups that compose it and of the characteristic of the groups. 29. Reconfiguration - There is an additional role that the media might play. This role does not consist in prefiguring a society on the verge of being born or in figuring an already existing society, but in reconfiguring a given society, in transforming it, retouching its face. 30. The effects of an event - was believed to be only posterior and exterior to the event. The main effect of an event consists of the event taking place, realizing its ritual vocation, being attended to and becoming deep play benefiting from felicity according to Austin8. 31. The success of an event - is made possible by a consensus among the organizers, translated into a clear proposition. It allows a community to feel itself, to see itself, measure itself, and to become aware of its own power. The success of an event is its illocutionary effect. It allows a group to self imagine.

J.L. Austin (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.