Global Spectacle Research Articles

A new world of spectacle in the post-cold war era: China's central television and its significant other, 1992–2006

As the Chinese society is increasingly looking outward, such official media outlets as China's Central Television have been adapting their international news production to the bend of marketization. A longitudinal content analysis of its flagship news program Network News from 1992 to 2006 found that although the quantity of international news hardly echoed such gear changes, the news’ timeliness increased remarkably. Consistent with previous findings about the distinctions between the conceptual devices of foreign news and foreign policy news, the focus of CCTV's foreign policy news coverage on the U.S. and East Asia indicated China's regionalized foreign policy design, while the increasing soft news in its foreign news coverage implied CCTV's inclination to tap the audience demands. A further examination of the U.S.—the longstanding “significant other” in CCTV's survey of global spectacle—echoed the Chinese bifurcated views of the U.S. in its pursuit of “peaceful rise”.

Counter-Spectacle, Anti-Spectacle, Olympic Spectacle: Olafur Eliasson’s Commission(s) for the London 2012 Festival

This article examines the role that the London 2012 Festival played in constructing and contesting the 2012 Olympic spectacle by considering two projects proposed by Danish-Icelandic artist, Olafur Eliasson: Take a deep breath and Olafur Eliasson: Little Sun. I propose that the former, which failed to gain funding and never made it onto the Festival line-up, would have produced a ‘counter-spectacle’ to the Olympic spectacle, should it have come to fruition. I contend that the latter, produced at London’s Tate Modern, provided an ‘anti-spectacle’ to the Olympic spectacle. The article considers what the respective ‘failure’ and ‘success’ of these projects begins to unveil about current developments in art, performance and global spectacle. I argue that while both projects aimed to challenge and diffuse the state-centrism of the Olympic Games, they are also indicative of the London 2012 Festival’s legitimisation of spectacle, rather than its contestation.

Media spectacle, insurrection and the crisis of neoliberalism from the Arab Uprisings to Occupy Everywhere!

I argue that 2011 witnessed a series of challenges to neoliberalism on a global scale perhaps not seen since the political upheavals of 1968, and that media spectacle provided the form of a series of global insurgences from the North African Arab Uprisings to the Occupy movements. Crises of neoliberalism also generated movements in Italy, Spain, Greece and other European movements that utilised strategies of the Arab Uprisings and provided global media spectacles of popular struggle and insurrection. In fall 2011, Occupy Wall Street adapted these tactics to symbolically attack the citadel of neoliberalism and the Occupy movement provided a democratic response to crises of capitalism and neoliberalism that have resulted in global economic crisis since 2008. The Occupy Wall Street movement in turn generated Occupy movements throughout the world under the slogan of Occupy Everywhere!

Soft power, ideology and symbolic manipulation in Summer Olympic Games opening ceremonies: a semiotic analysis

This paper is a semiotic analysis of Summer Olympic Games Opening ceremonies as performative texts. Owing to massive media attention, these events have become eagerly awaited global spectacles. However, with such a wide audience, the challenge is to convey both an Olympic welcome and something truly unique about the host city and nation. This creates a communication challenge and some interesting questions in terms of symbolism. Research into the content of Olympic Games ceremonies reveals an exercise both in forging internal cohesion and in projecting soft power. Soft power is an increasingly valuable currency in a multipolar world and opening ceremonies are a prime soft power opportunity. The paper seeks to uncover the ways successive Olympics Games organising committees have sought to balance the competing communicational objectives of opening ceremonies through double coding. The author considers every ceremony from Moscow 1980 to London 2012 in this comparative semiotic analysis.

Imagination Sterilized: The Workings of the Global Spectacle

The theme of this essay is the immediacy of visuality, the dominant form of experience by which the species thinks itself of and in the world, as continuous with the world. Since the early years of the twenty-first century, a series of global spectacles has emerged and broken away from notions of ideology. This emergence testifies to the transformed role of the state in a globalized capital formation and the occurrence of two paradigm shifts: from the narrative to the visual, and from the image’s dominance of aesthetic representation to its dominance by global capital. The global spectacle, together with the new social media, has contributed to the creation of “visual allure” as a place to build common sense and the ethics of hedonism. It does so not only by its ability to create a more extensive level of commodity fetishism but also by virtue of its ability to map on the species an encompassing system of apparatuses in which every cultural diversity, every individual desire, and every version and vision of life become essentially a realization of one of the possibilities contained within the imagineering of the system. The global spectacles celebrate the intersections of the postindustrial financial economy and the human’s present ways of being atop a series of social and aesthetic categories that are at once privatized, social, and cultural. These categories are timeless pleasure, impulsive subjectivity, and recuperative possibilities. This essay elaborates on these categories and their complementary relations with the global spectacle.

The news and local production of the global

Key to the local audience’s conceptions of the global spectacle, the marketized regional press in China has been increasingly confronted with a complex world to cover as China finds itself integrating steadily into the global marketplace and rising as a formidable power in the post-WTO era. Using the data collected from five Chinese regional newspapers in 1989 and 2009, this study indicates that the consequences of spillover in China’s growing integration with the global system and the ever-increasing media marketization have been carried into the domain of international news, particularly in terms of a more neutral journalistic perspective and a widened range of vision at the local level. The results also show that the regionalization of international news reporting is still contained within the orbit of the party-state. The comparison over a 20-year time span suggests that China’s integration into the world capitalism system has opened up a larger global landscape for the local press, but not necessarily a wider latitude to negotiate the terrain.

The “Fall” of What? FIFA’s Public Viewing Areas and Their Contribution to the Quality of Public Life

Much conventional scholarship considers “the public” to be in decline in the modern Western world, following a range of cultural developments believed to encourage withdrawal into the private domain. Public Viewing Areas devoted to communicating live events may be interpreted as countering such a trend by attracting audiences to the public sphere. This article examines how the world governing body of association football, FIFA, recently aimed to achieve such an objective by broadcasting the 2010 World Cup at six designated international Fan Fest sites. Drawing on theories of “spectacle” and sociality, the implications of FIFA’s initiative are interrogated by examining whether the environment and surveillance measures characterizing the “global spectacle” facilitated social interaction. In the process, established understandings of the “fall” and “quality” of public life are canvassed to propose how these collective fora might engender “meaningful” public communication beyond crowd assimilation through spatial co-presence and shared mediated imagery alone.

Mediated Modernities and Mythologies in the Opening Ceremonies of 1964 Tokyo, 1988 Seoul and 2008 Beijing Olympic Games

Embedded in the Opening Ceremonies of Tokyo 1964, Seoul 1988 and Beijing 2008 are historical narratives of indigenous culture and contemporary statements of global modernity in visual form. Within the setting of a global spectacle, these visual depictions provide symbolic evidence of host cities and nations asserting East against West, yet East in union with West. The Opening Ceremonies configure national allegories, in the use of the modern media as a powerful medium of the presentation of both tradition and modernity. This essay provides a nuanced reading of the Asian Olympic Ceremonies and argues for a subtle interpretation of the tensions between tradition and modernity, culture and heritage, modernisation and westernisation.

Unveiling the global spectacle: Difference, identity and community

This paper analyzes the ‘seeing’ of difference, and its relation to identity and community. It argues that Western images of the Other are part of an obfuscating global spectacle and it explores ways in which this spectacle manipulates and diverts our perceptions of difference, obscures social and political contradictions, and blinds us to the possibilities of an inclusive, democratic and pluralistic society. By examining the complex ways in which vision and identity are shaped by social narrative and esthetic cravings, we show how traditional views of identity and community can be altered for the better by interrogating and reimagining visions of self and Other.

Changing La Chureca: Organizing City Resilience Through Action Nets

This article aims to contribute to the literature on city organizing, an important yet under-researched area in the intersection of organization theory and urban studies. The concepts of the city and change, translation and action nets are fundamental to this analysis. The study takes as its object the collective process of organizing the change of La Chureca, the rubbish dump of the city of Managua, Nicaragua. Through its translation into a global spectacle of degradation, La Chureca has become a flagship for urban change projects. La Chureca is referred to as an example of an ‘uncanny place’. In association with urban social movements, these uncanny places are strong catalysts for mobilizing urban change and resilience. The article concludes by discussing the revival of the local in Latin American cities and the permeation of the historical role of urban movements as agents of change in the processes of urban governance and managing resilience.

The religion in Olympic tourism

Olympic tourism has been likened to pilgrimage [Weed, M. (2008). Olympic tourism. Oxford: Elsevier], and Olympic sites called ‘shrines’ for the ‘pious sport tourist’ [Gammon, 2004]. Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, promoted the ‘cult of the human being’ [Ruprecht, L.A. (2008). Greek exercises: The modern Olympics as Hellenic appropriation and reinvention. Thesis eleven, 93, pp. 72–87], which had distinctly religious overtones. Sport may be a functional equivalent of religion in the modern world [Cusack, C.M. (2010). Sport. In R.D. Hecht & V.F. Biondo (Eds.), Religion in everyday life and culture (pp. 915–943). Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger], and as a global spectacle, the Olympics perform the ideal of de Coubertin's ‘harmony of nationalisms’ [Moltmann, J. (1989). Olympia between politics and religion. Concilium, 101–109]. This acting out and collective affirmation of humanist principles is civil religion; quasi-religious beliefs and practices connected with citizenship and political community, which here affirm the pre-eminence of the human individual. Olympic tourists celebrate human achievement, and participate in a mediatised mass spectacle of consumerism. Olympic tourism has similar religious significance to other mass-mobility events (the Hajj and the Kumbh Mela), which take on significance for visitors beyond the immediately theological. Yet, the religio-spiritual elements of Olympic tourism have received less attention than other secular pilgrimages (battlefields and the World Cup). We argue Olympic tourism is a quasi-religious pilgrimage that moves participants closer to, and through, a spectacle event upholding certain socio-cultural ideals of the wider project of the affluent, Western culture and identity, embodied in the Olympics.

Media ethics perceived through the prism of fear and panic condition affects

The concept of public space adapts to the character and philosophy of new media, creating abundance of information that are receiving ever more important social role. The postmodern society often pulsates to the beat of dynamic transformation of political, economic crises, technological revolutions, climate changes, terrorist attacks, media illusions and global spectacles. Staging of communication leads to the abolition of sense, homeopathic grafting of moral panic that is oversized compared to the facts of the subjects basis. The media no longer have an informative and educational function; quite on the contrary, they amuse us, shock us, and develop our 'negative' curiosity by their black chronicles. The race for profits led to violations of professional standards of reporting, such as truthfulness, balance and objectivity. It is important to be the first at any cost, while the infliction of harm to individuals is not often considered. High circulation and rating no longer reflect media quality.

“Rumble in the Jungle”: Muhammad Ali vs. George Foreman in the Age of Global Spectacle

Abstract This essay explores the domestic and international implications of the 1974 title match between Ali and Foreman in Zaire. Beamed across the world via satellite, the bout was a global spectacle of Black Power and Black Nationalism. Ali was a pan-African star whose Islamic religion and opposition to the Vietnam War made him a global champion in an era of colonial rebellion. The bout also dramatized the crumbling civil rights consensus in the black community, as Ali embodied Black Nationalism and sixties rebellion, while Foreman defended the establishment and liberal civil rights. His flag-waving gesture during the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, made him a patriotic counter to black rebels in sport and a rescuer of an American belief in its national exceptionalism. Pan-African star Ali took advantage of the African setting to win over the African masses, who rooted for him as an anti-colonial hero.

Philosophy of fear and (re)construction of media reality

The post-modern society often pulsates to the beat of dynamic transformation of political, economic crisis, technological revolution, climate changes, terrorist attacks, media appearances and global spectacles. The concept of public space adapts to the character and philosophy of new media, creating abundance of information that are getting more and more important social role. Bad news, disinformation, data conversion and ideologically driven interpretation are a part of the current media discourse, which favors fear as merchandise in demand on the information market. Staging of communication leads to the abolition of sense, homeopathic grafting of the moral panic that is oversized compared to the facts of the subject basis. (Re) construction of reality is based on the creation of meaning that comes from the social environment, ideas, symbols and images that dominate in a particular place and time. The reality is more and more a product of media meanings we are giving it. The authors examine the phenomenon of fear, especially the symbiosis of political actors and the mass media, using market uniformity to feed the hunger of the already anxious audience.

Leisure and sport at a time of global tourism

The development of the worldwide market has motivated long-ranging consequences, not only at the level of growing economic interdependencies, but also in the globalization of cultures and lifestyles. At any of these dimensions, sport plays a role and contributes in its own particular way to globalization. Transnational organizations, worldwide events, transnational communities and transnational structures organized around the central theme of Sport provide good evidence of that phenomenon. However, the way how these dimensions interrelate at a time of unorganized capitalism is based on disjuncture. Following this thesis, Appadurai (1996) has proposed an elementary scheme for the analysis of the disjuncture between the several dimensions of globalization, suggesting the notion of landscapes to underline the fluid and irregular shape of the capital flow, pertaining to both communications and lifestyles. By emphasizing that globalization is intensively perceived according to, and influenced by the historical, linguistic and political contexts of the intervening players, the author deliberately focuses on the imagined worlds that help us constructing those landscapes. In this paper, we will retrieve some of those theoretical leads and will analyse three types of landscape in the leisure and sports contexts, in an attempt to demonstrate how their interrelation is one of disjuncture, where some dimensions promote sports homogenization while others push towards increasing differentiation. We will analyse the mediascapes (Sport as global spectacle), the technoscapes (the role of the new media and velocity in the creation of decontextualized global cognitive maps), and the ideoscapes (the role of images and the aesthetization of the leisure sports experiences).

Sport and Globalisation: Homogenization and Differentiation

Sport and Globalisation: Homogenization and DifferentiationThe development of the worldwide market has motivated long-ranging consequences, not only at the level of growing economic interdependencies, but also in the globalization of cultures and lifestyles. At any of these dimensions, sport plays a role and contributes in its own particular way to globalization. Transnational organizations, worldwide events, transnational communities and transnational structures organised around the central theme of Sport provide good evidence of that phenomenon. However, the way these dimensions interrelate at a time of unorganised capitalism is based on disjuncture. Following this thesis, Appadurai (1996) has proposed an elementary scheme for the analysis of the disjuncture between the several dimensions of globalization, suggesting the notion of landscapes to underline the fluid and irregular shape of the capital flow, pertaining to both communications and lifestyles. By emphasising that globalization is intensively perceived according to, and influenced by the historical, linguistic and political contexts of the intervening players, the author deliberately focuses on the imagined worlds that help us construct those landscapes. In this paper, we will retrieve some of those theoretical leads and analyse three types of landscape in the leisure and sports contexts, in an attempt to demonstrate how their interrelation is one of disjuncture, where some dimensions promote sports homogenization while others push towards increasing differentiation. We will analyse the mediascapes (Sport as global spectacle), the technoscapes (the role of the new media and velocity in the creation of decontextualised global cognitive maps), and the ideoscapes (the role of images and the aesthetisation of the leisure sports experiences)

Narcissism: fragile bodies in a fragile world

In this two-part paper we explore how, in Western society, intensified consumer culture, playing on feelings of shame and inadequacy, can be seen as reactivating the ‘narcissistic wound’ while the recent growth of information technology increasingly provides access to a global spectacle and a virtual world that offer an escape from reality. This fuels the illusion of immortality and invulnerability to physical/emotional needs. We ask who benefits from this culture of unrelatedness and disembodiment, and what the repercussions are in terms of participation in social life and organized response to global issues. Using material from our practices and from social life, we seek to identify the collective cost of maintaining a disassociation that can permeate not only the therapeutic process but also work, personal relationships and events on the political stage. We consider a view of former president Bush as a narcissistic leader in a narcissistic culture with the Iraq war as a narcissistic misadventure and we present vignettes from the consulting room, Dance Movement Therapy work in Holloway Prison and the academic world of prehistoric archaeology to show how narcissistic behaviours are embedded in many diverse situations in Western society. We ask how the concept of narcissism in our media age can help us understand phenomena such as the rise of fundamentalism, celebrity cults, insatiable aspirations to ‘self-improvement’, obsessions with ‘success’ and consumer goods, the denial of ageing, the upsurge in cosmetic surgery, body modification and self-harm as well as growing addiction to alcohol and hard drugs. Finally, we ask how the narcissistic fantasy of self-sufficiency, the disavowal of loss and the denial of the ultimate non-discursive reality of death affect our ability to respond appropriately to human injustice and the fragility of our planet. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Narcissism: fragile bodies in a fragile world. Part 1

In this two-part paper, we explore how, in Western society, intensified consumer culture, playing on feelings of shame and inadequacy, can be seen as reactivating the ‘narcissistic wound’ while the recent growth of information technology increasingly provides access to a global spectacle and a virtual world that offer an escape from reality, fuelling the illusion of immortality and invulnerability to physical/emotional needs. We ask who benefits from this culture of unrelatedness and disembodiment and what are the repercussions in terms of participation in social life and organized response to global issues. Using material from our practices and from social life, we seek to identify the collective cost of maintaining a disassociation that can permeate not only the therapeutic process but also work, personal relationships and events on the political stage. We consider a view of Bush as a narcissistic president in a narcissistic culture with the Iraq war as a narcissistic misadventure, and we present vignettes from the consulting room, Dance Movement Therapy work in Holloway Prison, and the academic world of prehistoric archaeology to show how narcissistic behaviours are embedded in many diverse situations in Western society. We ask how the concept of narcissism in our media age can help us understand phenomena such as the rise of fundamentalism; celebrity cult; insatiable aspirations to ‘self-improvement’; obsession with ‘success’ and consumer goodies; the denial of ageing; the upsurge in cosmetic surgery, body modification and self-harm; as well as growing addiction to alcohol and hard drugs. Finally we ask, how do the narcissistic fantasy of self-sufficiency, the disavowal of loss and the denial of the ultimate non-discursive reality of death affect our ability to respond appropriately to human injustice and the fragility of our planet? Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

As Seen on TV or was That My Phone? New Media Literacy

Media literacy studies traditionally have been the domain of the English and Language Arts classrooms. Cultural studies has not made significant inroads into school-based media studies although, like media studies, it too is concerned with the politics of image/text representations. Information literacy, which also passes as computer or technology literacy, has focused principally on the teaching of operational ‘how-to’ skills. In the last decade, consumers have abandoned newspapers, magazines and network television en masse in favour of cable and Internet news and entertainment sources. Fast news and 24/7 coverage – of 9/11, the US presidential 2004 campaign, world soccer, the 2003 Bali bombings, or the Boxing Day 2004 tsunami in South-east Asia – are global spectacles watched by billions. Given the rapid drift towards media convergence, and consumer shifts from ‘old’ to ‘new’ media, it is argued that media literacy studies, cultural studies, information or technology studies can no longer be taught independently of each other.

The Local Politics of 'Going Global': Making and Unmaking Minneapolis-St Paul as a World City

Minneapolis-St Paul is a good candidate for 'world city' status. The metropolitan area ranks 15th in the US in population; ranks 8th in total exports; hosts the headquarters of some of the largest transnational corporations in the world including 3M, General Mills, Target and Cargill; is home to the largest Somali and Hmong populations in the US; and has hosted major global spectacles such as the International Special Olympics and the Super Bowl. At the same time, Minneapolis-St Paul is far from embracing a world city identity. Although seen largely as beneficiaries of globalisation, residents of the Twin Cities routinely elect politicians to both the local and national levels who oppose free trade. Local efforts to make the metropolitan area into a world city, backed mainly by boosters in city and state government as well as large locally based corporations, have met with inconsistent political leadership, a lack of broad business support, and a strong democratic local politics which has limited the power of corporate interests both to direct the region's economic development and to define the content of its international ties. In other similarly sized cities (such as Atlanta or Cleveland) corporate and political leaders have for the most part done as they pleased in building the city's international character, but in Minneapolis-St Paul these actors have been largely defeated by populist politics. The case of the Minneapolis-St Paul world city project demonstrates the ability of a vibrant opposition both to moderate an elite drive to 'go global' and to define urban 'success' and 'prestige' in markedly non-global terms.