Events, Global

A global event refers to a large-scale, mass-mediated collective happening that may be planned or unexpected, with limited duration and significant transformative capacities that reach well beyond its physical location. Known variously as mega-events, public events, hallmark events, televised spectacles, or simply public rituals, such planned occasions are spectacular demonstrations of the power to rationally design and then meticulously perform in a controlled way the planned order of collective human activity, in a particular place, during a specific period of time, on an ever growing scale. In contrast, unexpected events tend to have a shocking effect, underscoring vulnerability, unpredictability, and the limits of human capacity to control nature and sociality, often in the face of collective efforts to mitigate loss and damage.

Paradigmatic examples of planned events, the Olympics and the World Cup, are cyclical occasions that are scheduled decades in advance on multiyear cycles. One-time happenings such as weddings, funerals, or state visits of dignitaries are noncyclical planned events. The latter may be losing the media spotlight as public attention turns to disasters, accidents, wars, terror, and scandals. Such unexpected events are extreme phenomena of sudden intended or unintended destruction of human and natural resources at various levels of complexity. Global events are interruptions into the daily routine life that may implicate millions of people around the world. They are intensively felt, cognitively processed, and emotionally experienced for a relatively short period of time, but their consequences tend to be longer lasting. Their intensity may have a potential to promote [Page 533]awareness that the world is interconnected and interdependent. Global events also illuminate tendencies, trajectories, and capacities for organization, governance, power, and control at the global level.

The sheer physical scope of global events and their digitally transmitted communication enable a variety of subevents to occur simultaneously and make it possible for millions of people to be connected to the event in a variety of ways. For locals and visitors from numerous countries around the world who are physically at the event site, such occasions are lived and phenomenally experienced events. Internet surfers, television audiences, and newspaper readers, wherever in the world they may be located, are able to follow the transmission of what is happening on the ground via worldwide broadcasting and news media systems. In situ participants and viewers of transmitted images may be in multiple locations at the same time. While sitting in the comfort of their home environment, television audiences can view broadcasts that allow them to follow the event in minute details that are often not available to in situ participants. Cellular phones, in turn, allow those at the event site to transmit their own images and narratives to family and friends wherever in the world they may be. Such multiplicity of communication flows detailing the process of the event as it transpires allows audiences to create a subevent of their own, uniting friends, family, or community organizations around the occasion.