Tomás Eon Barreiros (Centro Universitario Positivo Curitiba, Brazil)
Media Events and Reality Construction
7th July 2007, 15:30, “Kleiner Saal”
Media events have been one of the most important tools that builds the reality, according to what Elihu Katz and Daniel Dayan said about it (“In a further step, they enter the collective memory”). Through the news, selecting the supposedly most important facts, media creates a partial view of the world. These pieces of important facts will be showed to the receptors in a way that they will see this partial reality built by the media as pure reality. On media events concern, their presentation creates a reality that will be part of collective memory and imaginary. Under the light of the studies from Maxwell McComb and Donald Shaw, it’s easy to imagine the agenda setting effects of media events. Just remembering McCombs and Shaw: “the mass media may not be successful in telling us what to think, but they are stunningly successful in telling us what to think about.” Media events have a great role to stablish an agenda setting in local or global level. In this way, Eliseo Veron’s words can be well applied to media events: “Social happenings are not objects that are found ready somewhere in reality and whose properties media makes us know after. They don’t exist unless media makes then up”. The “eventization” of a fact makes it be much more important than it really is creating a reality that goes beyond the importance of that.