Preamble Narratives and Social Memory - Universidade do Minho

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Hard News Cognitive Shift: from Facts to NarrativesLuiz G. Mottaits particular point of view in the story. A hierarchy of influences takes place: political andeconomic institutions, media organizations, news professionals, and original sources bringto the media scene conflictive interests. These social actors engage in a continuous, nonovertnegotiation about what aspects are newsworthy, what topics should be prioritized andhow the incidents will be framed. This political bargaining transforms the sequence of hardreports about a single incident into a polyphonic and polysemic narrative matrix of manyvoices rather than a tidy plot.The hypothesis about the intrigue matrix in hard news reports comes from PaulRicoeur’s (1995) ideas about the manifold embodiment of plural voices in narrative composition:who is speaking?, he asks. To answer the question, he suggests the incorporationof the narrative categories of narrator and personage (and personage’s discourse) into themimeses of action, also taking into account that personages are agents who think and act(particularly the personages of news stories). He calls this process poetic composition. Thequestion then becomes: to what extent are news reports the discourses of a single narratorwho assesses the discourse of a personage? He then suggests the notion of plurivocalnarrative, meaning that a report may simultaneously embody many different voices. Lookingfor ‘who is speaking’ becomes the new guide for the complex determination of the voicespresent in any report. The hegemony of one voice only or the dialogue of various voices inthe content of a report suggests the idea of an unfinished composition, which Ricoeur callsan intrigue matrix. At the limit, he concludes, this type of composition generates a new kindof literature, different from one author’s univocal fiction.The hard news report production process is very different from that of a single author’snovel, of course. More and more different social actors interfere directly or implicitly, aimingat imposing their almost always opposite points of view about a single incident, and havingtheir private view at least partially printed or broadcast. What gets into or is left out of thereport, and how the issue will be framed, depends upon the political force of each socialactor and the correlation of power in every situation. Steve Reese (2011) proposed an interesting‘hierarchy of influence model’ to distinguish the production process in journalismas a web where power and ideological constraints are exercised and policy is enforced.His model reminds us that news is an institutional product manufactured by increasinglycomplex economic entities that stretch far beyond their immediate organizations. He meansthat the effects of various voices put pressure upon the press agenda, as well as uponhow issues are framed and social life is verbally presented. These are the reasons why Ipropose to understand hard news reports as an ever imperfect and incomplete intriguematrix instead of a conclusive narrative.Hypothesis 2: Random bits of hard news information about a single incident reportedby mass media every day configure a tangible narrative only when the audience cognitivelyreorganizes them into a thematic episode. Hard news reports may be primarily understood asa sporadic and practical form of knowledge. This is partially true, but it is only a small partof the cognitive process that can be found in everyday hard news reading, listening or viewing.How are people using the scattered information they get every day from hard news?Narratives and social memory: theoretical and methodological approaches98
Hard News Cognitive Shift: from Facts to NarrativesLuiz G. MottaI suppose people always aim at configuring the random information they get into shortchronological stories (single totalities). People tend to link random meaningful parcels oneafter another, establishing thematic chronological sequences: antecedents and consequents,causes and effects, and so on. Individuals tend to build up imaginary narrative representationsof reality because they need to cognitively gather information parts into a comprehensibletime-order totality.The arguments that support this hypothesis come from the ideas of the renownedcultural psychologists Jerome Bruner (1990) and Kenneth Gergen (1994), who have calledattention to the fact that people tend to organize information in terms of narrative frames.Narrative frames, they say, organize our chaotic experience of social reality. Bruner hasinsisted on the narrative nature of common sense (popular psychology in his words). Thesenarrative frames weave meaningful textures, chronologically putting together the manyrandom events we grasp through the information we get every day, be it of a factual orfictitious nature. That is the way, he claims, we all make sense out of the dynamic, complexand chaotic world. Bruner emphasizes that shared inferences out of common cultures arepossible because of the narrative apparatuses we have at our disposal when facing eitherconsensual or exceptional situations. His radical thesis states that narrative frame is thetypical scheme for demarking cultural experiences: what is not organized in a narrativepattern, he says, vanishes from memory.Gergen asserts that narrative expositions are encrusted on social acts, making humanaction socially visible. Insofar as information about everyday events is inserted on narrativeframes, it comes out in our minds in meaningful representations: sketches of real lifeacquire a sense of a beginning, a climax and a final cut. People, he says, live their lives thisway and classify social happenings within this narrative frame. Life does not copy art: statingit better, he goes on, art is converted into the medium through which real life manifestsitself. Life is not composed of instant photos of everyday events, he adds: it is a permanentlyin course process. Understanding an action, he concludes, is situating it in its antecedent andconsequent causes. Instead of watching our lives in terms of sporadic devilish incidents oneafter another, we are continuously rearranging sequential reports of vital events. He radicallystates that: instead of reflecting our everyday lives, narrative frames create the senseof what is or is not real; the structure of narration precedes the events themselves.Hypothesis 3: A coherent narrative about a single incident is configured only after theaudience fills in what is lacking in hard news reports about a single incident and links missedconnections thereby completing a thematic episode. Integral stories are configured solelyat the very moment of everyday reception of hard news reporting. Undertaking an activeperformance, the audience fills in what is lacking and makes the missing connections tocomplete thematic plots. This process wipes out the strictly factual and practical inferencesand activates cathartic experiences. The narrative frame is not configured in a hardnews factual report itself, as was said before. New original bits of information are continuouslybeing added by the media, rendering the presentation and configuration of integralstories difficult. The absence of fundamental narrative requisites in hard reports (sequence,Narratives and social memory: theoretical and methodological approaches99
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© CECS 2013 All rights reservedThi
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Cinematic Landscape and Social Memo
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comprises both remembering and forg
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include important questions related
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Part ICognitive and Emotional Proce
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Narratives and Social Memory from t
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The Lay Historian: How Ordinary Peo
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Cabecinhas, R. & Abadia, L. (eds.)
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The Works of Sísifo: Memories and
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Audiovisual Post-colonial Narrative
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The Subject-Matter of Audiovisual H
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Criminal violence in Brazilian movi
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Part IVEthnic, National and Suprana
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Narratives of Redemption: Memory an
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Memory and the Flows of Identity in
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‘Diaspora Space’ as Heard and O
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Colonial Missions in the North Amer
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Part VSocietal Issues, Collective A
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Collective Mobilization and the Soc
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Narratives as Prison ‘Escapes’:
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Drawings and Narrative: the Inmates
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Comissões Unitárias de Mulheres d
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Adozinda Goes to the Feminine Readi
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