Lakhasly

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’.