The media and reality

Reflection or construction?
 Traditional thinking on media
and reality
• Scholars have looked at how well the
media ‘reflect’ reality
– The focus has been on the news and how
good a job it does in presenting a correct
picture of the real world
– Those exposed to a true picture are then
expected to remember it as they saw/heard it
and use that faithful recreation in their own
lives, especially in political decision-making
 What is it that is represented?
• The ‘real world’ as it is
• Real time, geography with unreal characters and
events
• A plausible imaginary world and characters
• A fantasy world with plausible characters
• A fantasy world with fantastic characters
• Concepts that do not fit our notions of people
and places
 What kinds of claims to realism do
we find in media texts?
• An accurate depiction of an existing reality
– News
– Documentary
• An accurate depiction of an artificially created reality
– Reality TV
• A plausible explanation of events
– JFK
• A presentation that could happen—realistic fiction
• An historical account that has filled in the spaces
• A fantasy world with realistic characters
– Star Trek
• Pure fantasy
– Excalibur
Media artists often go to great effort
to make their texts realistic
• Hire historians, cops, members of groups
• Continuity
• Pre-testing
Chandler’s features of the visual
that relate to realism
• Formal features
– 3D-flat
• Renaissance development of perspective
– Detailed-abstract
• Shading
• Imperfect/stylized
– Colour-monochrome
– Edited-unedited
• Naturalism v. enhancement/selection
– Moving-still
– Audible-silent
• Natural sounds v. constructed audio
• Content features
– Possible-impossible
– plausible-implausible
– Familiar-unfamiliar
– Current-distant in time
– Local-distant in space
 Realist presentations
• Representation is supposed to ‘stand in’ for the
actual events and objects
• Work of representation hidden from view
– Third-person narration
– Camera work edited to be unobtrusive
– Actors, etc. never directly address audience
• “Fourth wall”
• Treatment of actions as displaying certainty—no discussion
of likelihood, probability, etc.
• Audience omniscience
 Entertainment
• Fictional media content was expected to
be discounted as a source of information
for use in life
– “Everyone knows it’s just a story”
• The real and the fictional were thought to
be kept entirely separate in people’s minds
and only the real was to provide guidance
for people to make life decisions
 Soap Operas
• The first significant crack in this view came with
studies of “daytime serial radio programs”
carried out by the Lazarsfeld group at Columbia
university in the 1930s and 1940s
– Study by Herta Herzog found that many women
listened to radio soap operas for guidance in their
daily lives
– They saw the characters as facing realistic personal
challenges and used their actions as guides for their
own behavior when facing similar decisions/problems
in their lives
 Parasocial Interaction
• Horton and Wohl, in the late 1950s, wrote
about an interesting phenomenon where
radio listeners and television viewers
developed emotional bonds with media
personas
– Often encouraged by the media personalities
themselves
• The “Lonely Girl”
 Cognitive Information Processing
• Information processing structures and activities
are not like those envisioned by overly
‘optimistic’ theorists
• A number of biases, limitations and simple
mistakes are common in information processing
• Limited capacity and satisficing are the rule
• Overcoming these limitations usually demands
attention—the allocation of processing effort to a
particular portion of sensory input, remembering
and reasoning
 What information processing tells
us about media and reality
• People tend to process stories,
information, etc. in similar ways whether
they experience it first- or second-hand
• Source information is not always encoded
with the information or recalled when
remembering the information
– Impact of information on judgments of reality
is reduced if people are reminded that they
saw something on television
 Suspension of disbelief
• Scholars have talked about the reader’s
implicit agreement to conspire with the
author/director to set aside questioning of
the reality of a media product and accept it
as real for the time being
– Implies a conscious decision to do so
 Reality judgments
• The more the experience of media
resembles the experience of the real
world, the more ‘realistic’ the media
experience
– However, some have discussed the concept
of the ‘hyperreal’—the more real than reality
• Enhanced graphics, sound, access through
multiple camera angles, etc. make the experience
seem more real than the in-person experience
would be
 Spectatorship
• Conflicting views over whether the
audience comes to “identify” with the
protagonist (take on the actual identity of
the character) or act as an observer
(within or without the presentation itself)
– First-person shooter games
 Imagination
• The ability to imagine what a plot, person,
etc. would be like (even in a fantastic
world) is crucial for realism judgments.
– Developmental changes move realism
judgments from dependence purely upon
visual/aural aspects to conceptual aspects of
presentations
 Plot plausibility
• According to Shapiro, Pena-Herborn and
Hancock, the audience takes the position:
• “IF this were to happen, would it happen
like this?”
– Therefore, even fantasy can be ‘realistic’
• More unlikely behaviors, etc. are tolerated in
fantasy stories
• Even in stories that are based in the future, in
outer space, etc. the behavior of characters is
monitored for its “realism”
 Limited capacity and story
elements
• People can only process so much
content/thought at a given time
• Action, emotion, etc. can overwhelm the
processing capacity of audience members
so that they cannot “devote . . . Mental
capacity to thinking about whether a story
seems unreal at that moment”
 Hall’s dimensions of ‘reality’
• Alice Hall studied college students’ evaluations
of the realism of media texts
– Focus groups
• Identified 6 “means of evaluating the realism of
media texts”
– Plausibility
– Typicality
– Factuality
– Emotional involvement
– Narrative consistency
– Perceptual persuasiveness
 How do audiences evaluate
realism?
• What have researchers found are the
dimensions that audience members evaluate
story realism on?
– Magic window
– Social realism
– Plausibility
– Probability
– Identity
– Utility
 ‘Magic Window’
• “The extent to which television allows one
to observe ongoing life in another place or
inside the set itself.”
– Often seen as disappearing early in childhood
 Social realism
• “The extent to which television content,
whether real or fictional, is similar to life in
the real world.”
 Plausibility
• “The extent to which something observed
on TV could exist in the real world.”
– Willing suspension of disbelief
 Probability
• “The likelihood of something observed on
TV existing in the real world or the
frequency with which it occurs.”
– Cultivation
 Identity
• “The extent to which viewers incorporate
television content into their real lives or
involve themselves with content
elements.”
– ‘my soaps’
– daydreaming
 Utility
• “How much information or events
observed on television are useful to the
viewer in real life.”
– Soap operas as a guide for living
Features of the presentation
that affect its ‘realism’
– Continuity
– Technical quality
– Characteristics of the medium
• Modalities of perception: Sound, video, motion,
linguistic, etc.
 Are ‘natural’ and ‘real’ the
same?
• Actually, ‘natural’ presentation (start the camera and
walk away) often is experienced as ‘less real’ than
doctored
– Often hard to hear dialogue, etc. because of ambient sound
– Color, sound effects, etc. may need to be enhanced in order to
generate ‘realistic’ representation
– Time is often distorted (compressed) to make it more compatible
with expectations as well as to work with the story
• The ‘real’ in realistic presentation has as much to do with
culturally learned expectations as with capture of ‘true’ or
‘natural’ action, objects, etc.
 Beliefs about the impact of
media realism
• Enhance audience involvement
– Emotion
– Not necessary, though
• Increase learning
• Increase enjoyment
• Increase effect
– Violence
– Attitude change