Transcript Social Construction of Reality

Social Construction of Reality
From The Saturated Self
By Kenneth Gergen
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
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
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?
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?
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
Standards of good criticism
1. No approach is worth anything until the critic
argues that it is
2. 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
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)
Our role
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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
Cultural Criticism
• Consists of judging and analyzing mediated
texts and audiences
• Cultural critics include Beaudrillard (postmodernism), Fisk(popular culture, TV) and
Paglia (personalities/celebrities)
• Post-modernism is a socio-cultural approach
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.
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’
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
Deconstructing
The Purple Rose of Cairo
Woody Allen:
Master of self-reflectivity
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?
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?
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.