Global Iconic Events: How News Stories Travel Through Time, Space and Media
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation examines how a news event may become a global social myth. In order to track this voyage from the particular to the universal, I developed a theoretical concept of "global iconic events." I define global iconic events as news events that are covered extensively and remembered ritually by international media. I suggest five narrative aspects to consider in connection with them: (1) their narrative prerequisites; (2) their elevated and interpretative story; (3) their condensation into a simple phrase, a short narrative, and a recognizable visual scene; (4) their competing stories; and (5) their ability to travel across multiple media platforms and changing social and political contexts. I perform textual analysis on media representations from four distinct national contexts (West German, East German, Hungarian, and American) to examine two case studies. With the help of the central case study, the "fall of the Berlin Wall," I exhibit the successful social construction of a global iconic event. The second case study, the 1956 Hungarian revolution, illuminates some factors, in particular local counter-narration, incoherent and contextual international representation, forgetting, and marginality of the event's location, as instrumental in the failure of an event to become a global iconic event. While the East German border opening on November 9, 1989 was unintentional, confusing, and messy, its global message is not about "luck" or "accident" in history. Incarnated as a global iconic event, the fall of the Berlin Wall has come to communicate the momentary power that the otherwise hopelessly vulnerable individual can have. The event's elevated and interpretative story, condensed into a simple phrase, a short narrative and a recognizable visual scene, provides global civil society with a contemporary social myth. Through recycling, reenactment, possession, memorialization and other embodiments, the event's simple and universal story continues to travel su…
abstract: This dissertation examines how a news event may become a global social myth. In order to track this voyage from the particular to the universal, I developed a theoretical concept of "global iconic events." I define global iconic events as news events that are covered extensively and remembered ritually by international media. I suggest five narrative aspects to consider in connection with them: (1) their narrative prerequisites; (2) their elevated and interpretative story; (3) their condensation into a simple phrase, a short narrative, and a recognizable visual scene; (4) their competing stories; and (5) their ability to travel across multiple media platforms and changing social and political contexts. I perform textual analysis on media representations from four distinct national contexts (West German, East German, Hungarian, and American) to examine two case studies. With the help of the central case study, the "fall of the Berlin Wall," I exhibit the successful social construction of a global iconic event. The second case study, the 1956 Hungarian revolution, illuminates some factors, in particular local counter-narration, incoherent and contextual international representation, forgetting, and marginality of the event's location, as instrumental in the failure of an event to become a global iconic event. While the East German border opening on November 9, 1989 was unintentional, confusing, and messy, its global message is not about "luck" or "accident" in history. Incarnated as a global iconic event, the fall of the Berlin Wall has come to communicate the momentary power that the otherwise hopelessly vulnerable individual can have. The event's elevated and interpretative story, condensed into a simple phrase, a short narrative and a recognizable visual scene, provides global civil society with a contemporary social myth. Through recycling, reenactment, possession, memorialization and other embodiments, the event's simple and universal story continues to travel su…
author: Sonnevend, Julia
language: English
keywords: Communication, Sociology, Feature stories, Berlin Wall, Berlin, Germany, 1961-1989, Newspapers and globalization, Current events
date published: 2013
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:44:29Z
provider: Columbia University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Columbia University

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.7916/D8GB230T