Entertaining Crime by Mark Fishman

Author:Mark Fishman [Fishman, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology, Media Studies
ISBN: 9780202306155
Google: BXmqswEACAAJ
Publisher: Aldine De Gruyter
Published: 1998-01-15T04:41:42+00:00

CONCLUSIONS

There has been vast research on how individual media products affect the views of audiences. This chapter has shown that, while important, this is too narrow a conception to fully capture the profound ways in which media shape our social world. Certainly, "Cops" influences many viewers' attitudes. It demonstrates strongly how the storytelling of mass media can be ideological. Its techniques shape "raw reality" into made-for-TV stories that reinforce existing inclinations among many audience members toward law and order ideology. Yet this is only one way of thinking about its influences. We have also explored how, as reality TV, "Cops" plays a unique role in a broader media package about crime. It affects how we make meanings of other media accounts of crime in news, entertainment, and advertising, even as they, in turn, influence how we understand "Cops." Third, the chapter has shown how "Cops" not only portrays events and practices in the criminal justice system, but it actually helps reshape them. For example, it not only records arrests; it helps shape how they are conducted and experienced by the participants, and even how some future police officers may conduct their arrests.

To conclude, we will consider a fourth, broader way of thinking about media influence. Some theorists have stressed the central role of the mass media in profound long-term processes of social and cultural change. "Cops" is implicated in one such tendency. Some of the aspects of "Cops" discussed above make it increasingly difficult to distinguish what is fact and what is fiction, what is television and what is "real." This brings us finally to consider the notion of "hyperreality" (Baudrillard 1988):

Hyperreality is a postmodern sense of the real that accounts for our loss of certainty in being able to distinguish clearly and hierarchically between reality and its representation and in being able to distinguish clearly and hierarchically between the modes of its representation. (Fiske 1994:62)

The expanding penetration of media into all aspects of social life and the mutation of media products into new and hybrid forms are profoundly implicated in the tendency toward hyperreality. Despite its claim to be "raw reality," "Cops" exemplifies this trend toward the blurring of different modes of reality.

Baudrillard (1988) has described the emergence of the "more real than real," hyperreal realms of experience more intense and involving than banal everyday life. "Cops" has a formal property described earlier as "real time," which steps outside the pace and flow of conventional time and places the viewer in a new uncertain "time zone." "Real time" is not simply fictional time: sensory input indicates continuity. Yet things unfold at a strangely rapid pace, and not at a fixed point on the calendar, but in a kind of eternal present. "Real time" fits with Baudrillard's description of the "more real than real."

Reality TV also crosses boundaries between factual and fictional storytelling, and unsettles our hierarchy of the real this way. While there has always been interplay between crime fact and crime fiction, a more recent trend is hybridization.

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