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