Ambivalent rituals of belonging: (Re)theorising hybrid, violent media events

Abstract

The updating of media event theory for the digital age has been underway for some time, and several researchers have pointed out that the complexity of the hybrid media environment poses a challenge when it comes to understanding how media events in the present digital context ritually create belonging. In this article, we examine violent media events as hybrid phenomena and discuss their ritual workings in the present digital media environment. We apply what we call the 5 A’s – actors, affordances, attention, affect, and acceleration – as key analytical tools to empirically study such events. We also develop the concept of hybridity in relation to media events by proposing three auxiliary A’s: assemblage, amplification, and accumulation. Building on our earlier work, we call for more analytical consideration of the ambivalences in the ritual constructions of belonging (and non-belonging) in such violent events. We use the Christchurch massacre of 2019 as a case study to illustrate these conceptual developments.