Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
their work, receptors identify with and feel empathy towards the people appearing
in it and are transported into the represented world to the extent that they feel they
are in it and are willing to consider it real, while they are consuming it. The emo-
tional and cognitive impression that such living the narrative adds to the receptors'
experience is so intense that it is automatically incorporated in their knowledge of
the narrated facts, places or characters, whether real or fi ctional. This occurs to the
extent that the receptor subconsciously believes that they have lived what happened
way beyond the moment of reception and at every moment of their future, not only
when they evoke the experience but also when they fi nd themselves experiencing
similar situations. The highly immersive experience of narrative, albeit fi ctitious,
not only has effects on the receptor's cognition or emotions but also, at times, on
their behaviour.
Having reached this point, and before continuing, we should make it clear that
the need for transcendence, or to manipulate one's own image through the creation
of narratives, is not exclusive to the human beings of our era. It is not that other
people in the past were not aware of this capacity to leave their mark. But unlike
what happened in other eras, the modern-day media sphere, to a large extent a prod-
uct of digitalization, is public, personal, self-centred, rapidly accessible and expan-
sible, as well as being rich in details. The more or less generalised access to these
new forms of 'writings' or textures gives voice, in turn, to a greater number of
individuals and their individualities. In the past, very few people understood the
languages and mechanisms of expression; there are many more of us today. So, the
volume of information associated to events increases, as do the points of view of
how they are told.
Also, before continuing, we need to explain that personal narratives are a phe-
nomenon that was already generating much interest among philosophers late in the
last century. In fact, they led to the production of major theoretical diversity.
Although they were still living in an entirely analogue world, the thinkers of the late
twentieth century left us interesting, and still valid, refl ections. The prominence of
the concept, to begin with, led them to agree that knowledge, comprehension and
notions of ourselves, beyond consciousness as an organic or somatic product, were
produced through our own narratives (Fireman et al.
2003
). They agreed that we are
impelled to give sense to our lives in narrative format (McAdams
1993
, p. 134). The
mechanism they identifi ed for this is very obvious: the organisation of and search
for continuity or coherence between the experiences that lead us to associate our
memories from the past to situations that we live in the present and to those that we
expect in the future. We determine the meaning and sense of the experience on the
basis of the product of the relation that we establish between the experience that
inspires us to create a personal history and the personal history that structures our
experience (Fireman et al.
2003
, p. 4). Thinkers on the phenomenon, meanwhile,
also came to the agreement that because narration is the medium through which we
learn about the social world, our community and ourselves (Bruner
1986
,
1990
), it
is present in practically all human activities and products (Gardner
1991
). So, our
narratives, according to these thinkers, not only describe, communicate and exam-
