CATHARSIS AND CREDIBILITY IN THE TODAY MEDIA SPACE Cover Image

CATHARSIS AND CREDIBILITY IN THE TODAY MEDIA SPACE
CATHARSIS AND CREDIBILITY IN THE TODAY MEDIA SPACE

Author(s): Xenia Negrea
Subject(s): Literary Texts, Media studies, Communication studies, Drama
Published by: Editura Sitech
Keywords: media; aesthetic; emotion; disaster; drama; catharsis;

Summary/Abstract: In this study we aim to analyze how a story is built in today media space. Besides the linguistics norms concerning the meaning issues, the media story is a source of catharsis which can consume psychosocial energies. The public event becomes a media event and so it becomes an aesthetic event. The contemporary soul burns the pain and the anger watching TV, doing symbolic gestures, looking for uniformity. For our case study we chose to analyze the stories around the disaster from a Romanian nightclub; during a concert, a fire started and over 60 people died. We aim to describe the lexical ritual that we identified in the media discourse. We describe the patterns that generate meaning. We show how the subjectivity and the ideology bring closer the media discourse and the fictional one, and so we see that the report on such a tragedy means more empathy and less information, more emotional release and less storage of meanings. We can speak about the haste of a collective self to impose the ritual anger as a unique direction in front of a disaster.

  • Issue Year: 3/2017
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 144-162
  • Page Count: 18
  • Language: English