Media outlets have faced for decades a number of challenges both in terms of internal, 
direct competition and of the proliferation of alternative platforms for entertainment and 
information (Ytreberg, 2009). To ensure that people will stay tuned for long periods of 
time despite the increasing range of possibilities to choose from, specific content organization and presentation strategies come forward. In this regard, perhaps the most wellknown strategy is the ‘planned flow’ (Williams, 2003), in which media ‘fills time by 
ensuring that something happens’ (Doane, 2006:251), turning fragmentation into continuity. In the planned flow, through editorial work, discrete segments of content are 
organized in a logical and coherent manner. This constant, unceasing flux of content 
aims to maintain people’s eyeballs hooked on the same channel (Williams, 2003), often 
foregrounding and relying on the ‘explosiveness of the present’ and the ‘drama of the 
instantaneous’ (Doane, 2006). Under this context, an ‘event’ is something that breaks the 
ordinariness of the regular flow, either because it is an urgent happening or because it is 
a ceremonial proceeding conferred with significance (Dayan and Katz, 1992; Scannell, 
2014). Thanks to their status of exceptionality, media events represent intermissions on 
the routine, creating a sense of ‘sacred time’ that occasionally excludes everything else 
from attention (Dayan and Katz, 1992).
Moreover, although the narrative describing the strategic use of the planned flow is 
usually focused on broadcasting, a similar pattern can be identified in the social media 
environment. Defining ‘social media’ is a challenge, as there is not only a wide and incessantly growing range of platforms available but also the same application might have 
diverse uses and ‘become so many things to different people’ (Madianou, 2015:1). 
Therefore, by embracing the fact that most people make use of more than one platform 
and switch constantly between them, rather than picking a discrete application to examine 
I treat them here as a manifold, integrated environment of affordances from which people 
can choose depending on particular socio-technical purposes and needs (Couldry and Hepp, 2016; Madianou and Miller, 2013; Primo et al., 2017). Importantly, social media 
promise not only a connection to the ‘world out there’ and a general sense of community 
and belonging at (inter)national scale, but also the possibilities of interacting immediately 
with those who matter most, beyond para-social engagements (Baym, 2015). They are, at 
the same time, platforms for mass and interpersonal communication – or masspersonal 
communication (O’Sullivan and Carr, 2017) – blurring even further the boundaries 
between what matters at societal and individual levels.
Nevertheless, and similar to television, in the social media industry, more than grabbing the audiences’ attention, it is necessary to convert this attention into value. Potential 
eventfulness, then, emerges as a convenient strategy for generating interest and the consequential engagement (Ytreberg, 2009). By eventfulness, I mean ‘the possibilities for 
endowing event-status through media’, and what we have now is (to a great extent thanks 
to the pervasiveness of recording and sharing technologies) that ‘every moment becomes 
pregnant with historical possibilities, even if the overwhelming majority of time is ordinary’ (Frosh and Pinchevski, 2018: 136, 138). Potential eventfulness is, in short, about 
the latent futurity of the present, and the prospective remarkability of the prosaic.
In this regard, instead of focusing on extraordinary media events, I am more interested 
in people’s relations to media in the ordinariness of everyday life, and in how these routinely, uneventful interactions with others and with the world are mediated by digital 
technologies. Underlying this decision is the assumption that the power of social media 
emerges precisely from their world-building capacities (Frosh, 2019) and their apparent 
banality (Lovink, 2019) – or, as put by Chun (2017: 1), that ‘our media matter most when 
they seem not to matter at all’. I emphasize, however, the fact that even these habitual 
engagements are often punctuated by particular (media or life) events, and continuously 
impregnated by potential eventfulness (Frosh and Pinchevski, 2018) – that is, the expectation that something remarkable might happen any time, all the time, and that thus you 
need to be able to follow it as it unfolds in real time, ‘live’.