The pervasive use of media at current-day festivals thoroughly impacts how these live events are experienced, anticipated, and remembered. This empirical study examined event-goers’ live media practices – taking photos, making videos, and in-the-moment sharing of content on social media platforms – at three large cultural events in the Netherlands. Taking a practice approach (Ahva 2017; Couldry 2004), the author studied online and offline event environments through extensive ethnographic fieldwork: online and offline observations, and interviews with 379 eventgoers. Analysis of this research material shows that through their live media practices eventgoers are continuously involved in mediated memory work (Lohmeier and Pentzold 2014; Van Dijck 2007), a form of live storytelling thatrevolves around how they want to remember the event. The article focuses on the impact of mediated memory work on the live experience in the present. It distinguishes two types of mediatised experience of live events: live as future memory and the experiential live. The author argues that memory is increasingly incorporated into the live experience in the present, so much so that, for many eventgoers, mediated memory-making is crucial to having a full live event experience. The article shows how empirical research in media studies can shed new light on key questions within memory studies.
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All over the world, sport events are seen as significant tools for creating positive social impact. This is understandable, as sport events have the power to attract enthusiastic participants, volunteers and to reach large audiences of visitors and followers via (social) media. Outbursts of excitement, pleasure and feelings of camaraderie are experienced among millions of people in the case of mega events. Still, a fairly large section of the population does not care that much for sports. Some may experience road blocks, litter and noise disturbance from the events. Sport events generally require investments, often from local or national authorities. Concerned citizens rightfully point at alternative usage of public money (e.g. schools, health care). Thrills and excitement are good things, but does that warrant public money being spent on? Or is there a broader social significance of sport events? Can sport events help alleviate societal issues (like cohesion, inequality and non-participation), do they generate a social impact beyond what spectators experience during the event? In this report the authors have aimed to describe the state of play as regards the evidence for the occurrence of a social impact from sport events and the strategies that are required to enhance social impact from sport events. For the report, an extensive scan of the literature was performed and input was collected from a key group of international experts.
Aiming to re-conceptualize liveness in the social media era, this paper explores the temporality of liveness within the lived experience and media practices of cultural events. Through qualitative analysis of extensive interview material, diaries and media content from three very different Dutch case studies - Oerol Festival 2017, Serious Request 2017, and Pride Amsterdam 2018 – it will shed light on the participants’ experience of ‘time’ within the spatio-temporal proximity of these mediated ‘live’ events.As liveness is mediated attendance to events, the experience of the moment - the ‘now’ of the event - is always accompanied with the awareness of a variety of other moments in time: the moment that your friend watches your Facebook live stream; the algorithmic time that makes your post pop up on Instagram; the moment that you see the photo while back at work and remember the fun you had. As we are skillful media users and knowledgeable participants in event-spheres (Volkmer & Deffner, 2010), the experience of a live moment therein is blended with the idea of re-living it at a later time. Nowness and memory are intertwined as we create mediated memories that enact both future and past, the community and the self (Van Dijck, 2004). In this paper I argue that the prominence of live digital technologies within our deeply mediatized (Couldry & Hepp, 2017) society has made navigating event-spheres a very complex and layered temporal experience, a struggle between living and re-living moments that appear to us as current due to an interplay of immediacy and affinity.
