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.