ABSTRACT
The struggle to make oneself heard or seen is not a peripheral aspect of the social and political upheavals of complex societies; on the contrary, it is central to them. The struggle to capture the attention of media audiences is essential for an understanding of contemporary political militancy. Militant groups/action networks are locked within a struggle over 'meaning' which increasingly finds its forum within the mediated publicness opened by the media, historically with the development of print media and today with the expansion of this space of visibility with the advent and development of electronic media. Militant groups today are increasingly staging their actions as media events, in the general tendency towards the aesthetisation of politics, in order to occupy this space of visibility which is both opening and expanding in our period of what we designate as media modernity. (Peterson and Thorn, 1994) The media spreads the influence of militant actions and disseminates their messages within a mediated publicness where to paraphrase Todd Gitlin (1980), 'the whole world is watching' — simultaneously. Militant groups/action networks stage events in order to gain access to the public imagination through the mass media. In a sense, media events are irruptions in the routine occurrence of news. As Manning (1996) has pointed out, media events have become central to contemporary political experience. In his terms, media events are dramatically staged events which use the media's stylised forms and are informed by media logic. They are political events that employ m edia's power to amplify in political significance activities that might otherwise be invisible and their messages obscure. (Cf. Altheide and Snow, 1991)
The political strategies of militant groups/action networks are increasingly orientated toward media in their aim to capture the attention of ever-larger audiences. This brings us to another point in the analysis of the visualisation of politics, its dramatistic character. The media increasingly 'frames' political action as political 'spectacles'
which have a direct influence on militant groups and their choice of action strategies, encouraging, for example, enactments of violence.
