Family Conversations About Television

This is an examination of two kinds of conversations that parents and children sometimes have about television programs: first, conversations in which parents and children seek and/or exchange information about some aspect of reality portrayed or referred to on television; second, conversations in which family members discuss the appropriateness or inappropriateness of behavior shown or mentioned on television as a model for their own or other people\u27s conduct. Examples taken from an observational study of families watching television in their homes are used to illustrate some of the forms these conversations can take, and, on the basis of these illustrations and of some previous research, speculations are offered about the role such conversations might play in family members\u27 developing relationships to one another and to the “outside” world

Film: Visual Literacy

People who write about movies have traditionally referred to the conventions of cinematic representation—such things as low-angle shots, fade-outs, or flashbacks—as the “language” of film. Does the ability to understand this language require previous experience? Or, to put this question differently, would a “naive” viewer, someone who had never seen a movie before, be able to make any sense of his or her first encounter with this medium? The term visual literacy, popular among media scholars, reflects the widely held belief that the comprehension of cinematic conventions is indeed an acquired skill, comparable to fluency in reading or writing. In contemporary film scholarship, this belief is based largely on an extrapolation from the work of such writers as E. H. Gombrich regarding the cross-cultural variability of pictorial conventions. This body of literature is commonly assumed to have shown that any perceived similarity between pictures and the things they represent is simply the result of viewers’ unwitting assimilation of the representational standards of a particular culture or historical period. Consequently, it is argued, the ability to connect a picture to its intended referent must depend on prior familiarity with the conventions employed in that picture. As far as film is concerned, this argument has occasionally been supported by stories about misinterpretations reportedly experienced by early-twentieth-century filmgoers or other inexperienced viewers

Visual Communication: Theory and Research

As an organized subarea of academic communication scholarship, the study of visual communication is relatively new. For instance, at this writing, visual communication has not yet attained regular division status in either the International Communication Association or the National Communication Association. However, interest in visual issues appears to be growing among communication scholars, and the two books under review are part of a rapidly expanding literature (e.g., Barnard, 2001; Emmison & Smith, 2000; Evans & Hall, 1999; Helfand, 2001; Howells, 2002; Mirzoeff, 1999; Prosser, 1998; Rose, 2001; Thomas, 2000). As it seeks to differentiate itself from other scholarly areas with similar purviews (such as mass communication or cultural studies), the study of visual communication is increasingly confronted with two major issues. First, on a theoretical level, visually oriented scholars need to develop a sharper understanding of the distinctions among the major modes of communication (image, word, music, body display, etc.) and a clearer appreciation of the specific role that each plays in social processes. Second, on the research front, there is a need for more sophisticated ways of exploring visual meanings and investigating viewers\u27 responses to images. Taken together, the two books reviewed here touch upon both of these features of visual scholarship and make productive contributions with respect to each of them

Visual Advertising Across Cultures

In thinking about the role of images in cross-cultural advertising, a useful starting point is the concept of iconicity. In the vocabulary of communications theory, a mode of communication can be termed iconic if there is an analogical relationship between its constituent signs or symbols and the things that they represent (Sebeok, 2001; see also Peirce, 1991). For example, in the case of verbal onomatopoeia, a word contains an analogy to a real-world sound. In music, it can be argued that certain compositions - such as classical program music - contain analogies to human moods or emotions. However, the mode of communication that is most pervasively characterized by iconicity is pictorial communication. Indeed, iconicity is one of the defining aspects of visual images. Even relatively unrealistic images such as stick figures or cartoons are based on some degree of analogy to the visible structure of real-world objects and spaces. If images can bring us closer to the appearance of reality than other communicational modes can, are they also an effective means of communicating across cultural boundaries? Does the iconicity of visual communication make it a vehicle for the sharing of meaning between people who are separated by linguistic or cultural differences? These are increasingly important questions in the world of advertising. Because of the growing globalization of economic activity, commercial advertising is directed to an ever greater variety of linguistic and cultural communities. Among advertisers as well as researchers, this situation has led to a recurring concern about the degree to which it is necessary to tailor advertising messages to the characteristics of each specific community. Should different ads be produced for different languages and cultures, or can pictures be relied upon to transcend such differences

Video Ergo Cogito: Visual Education and Analogical Thinking

For more than a decade, educators and media critics have been arguing that we are on the threshold of a new age of visual thinking (e.g., Pittman, 1990). Their reasoning: young people\u27s minds are now being molded from the earliest years by intense exposure to television and other visual media; consequently, the young people of today are part of a new \u27visual generation.\u27 This is a widely accepted claim, and there are some data that seem to support it. For example, recent findings indicate that, over the past decade, young adults in the 18-24 age group have exhibited a pronounced increase in visual-arts involvement (Zill & Robinson, 1995). However, there is very little systematic theoretical work on the following basic question: if young people are indeed acquiring visually-oriented habits of thought from their encounters with visual media, what exactly do these habits of thought look like? To put this differently: if there is a visual intelligence, what mental skills does it consist of? This study is an attempt to give a partial answer to this question. Specifically, the study takes a close look at one particular type of mental skill that seems to play a major role in people\u27s uses of visual media—namely, analogical thinking. Consider, for example, a recent music video called Take a Bow, which portrays a sexual encounter between Madonna and a matador. This video contains a lengthy sequence in which the editing takes us back and forth between two scenes: on the one hand, Madonna and the matador having sex; on the other hand, the matador fighting a bull. This form of parallel editing is clearly intended as an analogy: the viewer is meant to see various strands of similarity between the passionate doings in one scene and the violent ritual in the other

The Film Audience\u27s Awareness of the Production Process

Christian Metz once argued that, of all the arts, film is the most capable of creating an illusion of reality in the audience\u27s mind.l It is certainly true that any movie whose chief aim is to provide vicarious experience whether of romance, adventure, horror or whatever-depends precisely on the medium\u27s ability to make the viewer forget about scripts, directors, production crews, and all other elements of behind-the-scenes manipulation. On the other hand, there are many circumstances in which a viewer\u27s obliviousness to these aspects of a film probably contradicts the intentions of the film\u27s creators. For example, a director who lavishes special attention on visual composition would no doubt be disappointed if viewers treated the images on the screen as random slices of reality. More seriously, perhaps, a viewer who loses sight of the deliberate ordering behind a movie\u27s sequence of events is also likely to have an incomplete understanding of the implications of that movie. For these reasons, it is important to know what kind of interpretive frame of mind viewers typically bring to movies. To what extent can the filmmaker assume that audiences will be aware of his or her presence, and what kinds of circumstances are likely to heighten or diminish this awareness