‘We’ll always stay with a live, until we have something better to go to … ’: The chronograms of 24-hour television news

Abstract

Drawing on Latour’s (1987) concepts of the sociogram and the technogram, this paper develops the concept of what we term the chronogram, a third axis along which each network actor is mapped so as to analyse its specific temporal network position and stability. The paper uses an empirical example of the television ‘live’ broadcast within the genre of 24-hour rolling news which relies so heavily upon the ‘live’ event, to argue that such an occasion enables actors to construct various simultaneous and sometimes conflicting chronograms which are performed or enacted within network space alongside ‘Newtonian time frames’. The theoretical intervention being explored here is that such an event as the extended ‘live’ news coverage of a particular story – here the release of the BBC journalist Alan Johnston from having been held hostage in the Middle East – is best explored through the lens of the chronogram, to reveal how the mechanics of the production of the television ‘live’ constructs or enacts various fluid temporal zones that exist alongside one another within networked space and that many of these zones remain deliberately and crucially concealed from the television audience.