Messaris, Paul

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  • Publication
    The Film Audience's Awareness of the Production Process
    (1981) Messaris, Paul
    Christian Metz once argued that, of all the arts, film is the most capable of creating an illusion of reality in the audience's 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's 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's obliviousness to these aspects of a film probably contradicts the intentions of the film's 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's 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?
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    Parents, Children, and Television
    (1986) Messaris, Paul
    This essay, like many others, is concerned with the effects of television on children, but what is different is the consideration of the role of parent within child-medium interaction. Paul Messaris deals with some intriguing issues such as the role of television in shaping our perceptions of reality and the role of parents in shaping our perceptions of television reality. Think of your early childhood experiences with this medium. How did you learn to distinguish the make-believe from the real, the commercial from the program, the drama from the news? Can you remember at what age? Are you still sometimes unsure? Did your parents use television characters and situations to teach you about the "real" world? Professor Messaris tells us the answers given by mothers to these and similar questions.
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    Video Ergo Cogito: Visual Education and Analogical Thinking
    (1996) Messaris, Paul
    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's 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 'visual generation.' 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's 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.
  • Publication
    Visual Communication: Theory and Research
    (2003-01-01) Messaris, Paul
    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' 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.
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    TV-Related Mother-Child Interaction and Children's Perceptions of TV Characters
    (1984) Messaris, Paul; Kerr, Dennis
    How does a parent’s or other adult’s involvement in a child’s TV viewing influence that child's responses to television? Much of the evidence on this question comes from experimental research. It has been shown that adult commentary can inhibit or intensify children’s imitative responses to a visual medium; that mothers’ comments can counteract children’s tendencies to follow the dictates of a TV commercial; and that adult commentary can enhance children’s comprehension of a TV program, as well as their retention of information and values presented on TV. Furthermore, studies in which mothers were merely encouraged to sit with their children (with no specific instructions as to what to say to them) while they were watching television have indicated that children learn more from the medium under such circumstances.
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    Work Status, Television Exposure, and Educational Outcomes
    (1983) Messaris, Paul; Hornik, Robert
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    Conceptual Problems Of Visual Literacy
    (2012-01-01) Messaris, Paul
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    Visual Aspects of Media Literacy
    (1998) Messaris, Paul
    A central component of media literacy should be an understanding of the representational conventions through which the users of media create and share meanings. This paper analyzes the representational conventions of visual communication. It distinguishes between semantic and syntactic conventions and focuses on those characteristics that most sharply differentiate visual language from other modes of communication. It examines the impact of visual literacy on viewers’ cognitive growth and on their development as informed consumers of visual media.
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    Visual Advertising Across Cultures
    (2007-01-01) Messaris, Paul
    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?