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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  • Publication
    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.
  • Publication
    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.
  • Publication
    How to Make Money From Subliminal Advertising and Motivation Research
    (2013-01-01) Messaris, Paul
    The news media began to report and editorialize about subliminal advertising in 1957, in response to events that are recounted in detail in Swift Viewing: The Popular Life of Subliminal Viewing, Charles Acland’s (2012) excellent history of the idea of subliminal influence (p. 91ff). Those events have been described by several previous writers, but one of the many virtues of Acland’s book is that he gives us the most carefully documented account to date.
  • Publication
    Visual Literacy vs. Visual Manipulation
    (1994-06-01) Messaris, Paul
  • Publication
    Image vs. Reality in Korean-American's Responses to Mass-Mediated Depictions of the United States
    (1991) Messaris, Paul; Woo, Jisuk
    This paper presents findings from a series interviews with Korean-American residents of Philadelphia. These interviews dealt with the informants pre-immigration experiences with images of the United States in movies, television programs, and magazines. The interviewees were asked to evaluate the role of these images in their decisions to immigrate and about their post-immigration responses to the relationship between these images and the reality of life in the United States. The analysis presented here focuses on ways in which reactions to the images might have been shaped by economic constraints and by values developed through formal education.
  • Publication
    On the Consequences of Television-Related Parent-Child Interaction
    (1981-04-01) Messaris, Paul; Sarett, Carla
    This is a theoretical examination of certain ways in which a child's development may be affected by parent-child interactions in which the content of television programming appears as an explicit referent, i.e., as the topic of a verbal exchange, as the premise for a game, and so forth. The discussion deals with four areas of development, viz.: (1) the child's interpretational skills with regard to the television medium; (2) the child's repertory of cognitive categories regarding the real world; (3) the child's behavioral repertory, including both verbal and nonverbal items; and (4) the child's social relation¬ships. The paper concludes with a discussion of certain methodological issues involved in the empirical examination of these matters.
  • Publication
    Visual Intelligence and Analogical Thinking
    (1997) Messaris, Paul