ABSTRACT

This chapter examines at the relationship between events and the mediatization of society. Events shape the news and wider popular cultural spaces. It focuses on Adorno's and Žižek's work on mediatization. They are the alpha and omega of mediatization, as it were, but they also provide important guideposts on the way to understanding the role of events in mediatization, and role of mediatization in events. Theodor Adorno was a product of the Frankfurt School, a critical theorist who attempted, with Horkheimer, to make sense of modernity, technology and the role of culture. Events exist in the real world of the social and the cultural, but the mediatization of these events follows the logic of instrumentality and hegemonic control. The media use these events to tell what is important and what is not important in leisure lives. So the coverage of professional sports and corporate music festivals serves to impose gender order, whiteness, nationalism and the privilege of the Global North.