The emergence of live television talk

Abstract

According to Bergson, time is constituted in emergence: as reality unfolds, so we are borne along into an ever-fresh and unpredictable new moment. This paper examines the consequences of this Bergsonian view of time for an analysis of the kinds of forms and structures that arise in live broadcast talk. It characterizes the situation of utterances in which live television talk is produced in terms of a notion of co-presence at a shared emergent reality, and suggests that it is this experience of presence at a jointly available and continually unfolding now that provides liveness with its edge of excitement and risk. More specifically, the paper provides a contrastive analysis of the language of live and pre-scripted television commentary, and argues that it is the production of emergent discourse in response to an emergent reality which gives live commentary its characteristic features