Social Construction of Reality

1. Social Construction of Reality From The Saturated Self By Kenneth Gergen

2. Contemporary Social Construction • Traditional categories collapsed • Genres blurred, blended, reformed • Words, once reflecting individual reality, now express group conventions • For group participants, forms of talking take on a local reality

3. Objective reality is being replaced by pseudo or staged reality • Political events staged for public consumption to simulate importance • Leaks are made to the media for strategic advantage • We make celebrities by manipulating information • Tourists encounter socially prepared experiences, not real surroundings

4. Quote “We have used our wealth, literacy, technology and progress to create the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life.” Question: What does this mean for audiences?

5. News Construction • We distinguish between objective reporting and yellow journalism, between unbiased reporting and propaganda. • Postmodern consciousness is eroding distinctions • “Our reporters don’t cover stories from their point of view; they present them from nobody’s point of view” (Pres. CBS News) Question: What does this mean for audiences?

6. Communication Criticism: the role of critic • Critics seek to describe, interpret and evaluate texts • Critics analyze texts • Critics relate their messages to other people • Audiences often assume the role of critic

7. Standards of good criticism • No approach is worth anything until the critic argues that it is • You must be able to demonstrate that your critical analyses are significant, relevant and coherent if readers are to take them seriously • Significance- so what factor • Relevance- how it applies to today’s audience • Coherence- substantial evidence for argument

8. Critical Frames Criticism is framed in literary, social and cultural traditions: Formal - literary, plot structure Neoclassical - persuasion, audience response Semiotic - verbal/visual codes Social - power relationships Cultural - values Psychoanalytic - Freudian, sub-conscious behavior Ideological - meaning systems (feminist, Marxist)

9. Our role • To characterize audience make-up • To analyze audience perceptions • To determine audience satisfaction • To understand audience motivation • To be appropriately critical of text delivered to specific audiences

10. Cultural Criticism • Consists of judging and analyzing mediated texts and audiences • Cultural critics include Beaudrillard (post-modernism), Fisk(popular culture, TV) and Paglia (personalities/celebrities) • Post-modernism is a socio-cultural approach

11. Beaudrillard • Consciousness of construction finds its most powerful expression in the concept of hyperreality. • Words gain meaning through reference to other words; literary works gain significance by relating to other writings. • Intertextuality prevails • Media portrays history by reporting histories of portrayal itself • Accounts layered upon accounts transform reality into hyperreality.

12. Hyperreality • Culture opens itself to the possibility of selves as artifacts of hyperreality • We used to ask whether movies furnished an adequate likeness of real life - good movies were most realistic • Now we ask of reality that it accommodate itself to film - the good person, good party - should be more ‘movieistic’

13. Self Reflection and the Intrusion of Irony • We shift from objects to objectifications, from reality to constructions of reality • We cross the threshold into a virtual vertigo of self-reflective doubt. • In A Purple Rose of Cairo a viewer takes up with her screen idle • As viewers, we are in the same position - living in one reality but absorbed by someone from another reality

14. Deconstructing The Purple Rose of Cairo Woody Allen: Master of self-reflectivity

15. Readings: Wicks • How are the four domains of media literacy (cognitive, emotional, aesthetic, moral) balanced? Do they ever act alone? • How do we separate common knowledge from opinion i.e. Choice vs Right to Life? • Do journalists make the assumption that truthful and objective messages don’t exist? • What is the audiences’ role in the construction of social reality?

16. Readings: Adorno • What is the basis for his criticism that the masses are objects of calculation and appendages of the industrial machinery? • How is the propagation of celebrities an indication of dehumanization? • Has the film industry created a ‘same America’? • Is creating feelings of well-being grounded in mediated deceit?

17. Readings:Fiske • How do objects become popular culture icons? • Excorporation suggests that we make do with what is available rather than create our own culture. Argue for or against this notion.