Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Preliminary discussion
Before proceeding to a closer examination of the Conversation Maps, two
points need to be made.
Firstly, in many structuralist, formalist, and/or older Marxist-inspired
analyses of narrative and media audiences, the audience member is often as-
sumed to be a “cultural dupe.” That is to say, it is assumed that a story delivered
through the media (e.g., radio, television, the Internet, etc.) is not really open
to interpretation and/or appropriation and means, more or less, one - and
only one - thing. Moreover, the one and only meaning of the story is exactly
what the audience member receives and, in this reception, is seen to be “pro-
grammed” by the story to behave or think in a certain manner by the story.
This description is an over simplification, but it underlies the heat generated in
arguments over which stories should or should not be taught in schools (i.e.,
the debate over the so-called “canon”) and also is a preferred viewpoint for
many writers of non-fiction as well as that of past builders of AI technologies
for “story understanding” who believed a machine could be built to understand
“the point” of a story. On the other end of the realist-to-relativist spectrum are
many post-structuralist and cultural studies-inspired media scholars who have
tended to emphasize the extraordinary creativity of audience members. Sto-
ries, and media productions in general, are seen as raw materials for audience
members to rewrite, reinterpret, and recreate in novel and undetermined ways.
By spending some time with the Conversation Maps of audiences' online
conversations, it should become clear that neither of these idealisms is em-
pirically supported. On the one hand, the range of responses to the television
stories is very diverse both in content and in genre. The “genres” of response
include these: some responses are close intertextual analyses of the plot and
characters of the episode, others are simple questions (e.g., “What's your fa-
vorite X-files episode?”), others are wildly tangential (e.g., “I have two kittens,
one named Mulder, the other Scully, and I'm looking for someone to adopt
them. . .”). On the other hand, only someone who is very easily amused will be
likely to see the messages contained in these archives as wildly creative.
Thus, as a first point, I maintain that a machine-assisted, empirical exam-
ination of audience conversation makes it quite easy to resolve an issue that is
often a point of debate in narrative theory and media studies: audience mem-
bers are not “cultural dupes,” but, neither are they more likely than any of
the rest of us to be wildly creative with the “raw material” of the stories seen,
heard, or read.
