Before, during and after. The contemporary construction of events 131 This clear distinction was articulated with another, about the participation of the actors/enunciators in each stage. Although Dayan and Katz express, with a good judgment, that the audiences participate in the first stage, that of negotiation because, for example, “the crowd that comes the night before to get a place in the procession itinerary, crowds for the event and supports it at the same time” “frames the event,” we know that the role of the public in that first stage was always very low and that in the same way that the three periods were clearly delim- ited, so were the roles of the actors/enunciators. We can remember here the paragraph quoted above fromVerón’s Preface about before and after: “the facts that make up this social reality do not exist as such (as social facts) before the media construct them.” Thus, although the analyzes are very different, we find again that the difference between before, during, and after in the era of mass media was nitid. Before was the time of waiting; the present was the moment in which the event came into existence (we can say, perhaps, in terms of Katz and Dayan, “one of the retransmissions of history”), and after, the moment of the dispute over meaning on what happened (note that for Verón also the after allows to distinguish another order of reality in the circulation of the event). All this has changed in our contemporaneity because the before (past) is no longer the time of waiting, prior to existence, but rather that of the active pre-construction of the meaning of the event. This pre-construction implies the participation, thanks to mediatization, of other actors/enunciators: those who in modern and postmodern events could only intervene in the after. Now, these actors/enunciators are already involved in de- bating on the polarized stage, exercising multiple actions (trying to condition the presence of others, to take the lead even before those who share the same political space, et cetera). In this reconfiguration, the present cannot be defined as the time of a representation because that term is profoundly insufficient. It is much more the one in which a set of simultane- ous flows of meaning, some born before, like the #AsambleaLegislativa2020, circulate from the “bottom” to the “top” and others, like #CEO’s, from the “top” to the “bottom” and simultaneously. And in which the collectives of individual actors and individu-
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