Creating a national holiday: media events, symbolic capital and symbolic power

Abstract

More supplements and complements to the concept of media events have been created since then; for example, the concept of popular media events and the labeling of Dayan and Katz’s approach as a ritual media event theory by Andreas Hepp and his colleague (cf. Hepp and Vogelgesang 2000; Hepp 2001) or Nick Couldry’s ritual theory perspective of media events (2003). Nevertheless, the concept of media events still remains in large part a basic concept of functional sociology. This means more precisely that Dayan and Katz’s approach only holds for specific media events and aims to establish how media events take place and how they are celebrated: “We think of media events as holidays that spotlight some central value or some aspect of collective memory” (1994: 9). Evidently, event theory is being developed fromCarey 1989; Gramsci 1991) and to Edelman’s (1976; cf. also Sarcinelli 1987; Dorner 1996) understanding of symbolic politics. We lacked the perspective to understand that day as a media event; instead, the power perspective was foregrounded compared with the work of Dayan and Katz.