Fake, Fact, and Fantasy by Maire Messenger Davies

Author:Maire Messenger Davies [Davies, Maire Messenger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781136687136
Google: RTH8AQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-11-05T05:53:48+00:00

All of the children who pressed pause for this series of coincidences referred either to the timing and the frequency of the interruptions, like Joe, or to their own experiences. For instance, Tim (fifth grade): “I play the piano, and nothing ever happens.” Sarah (fourth grade) and Ben (fifth grade) knew the right word:

Sarah: That kind of thing could happen, but really it wouldn’t. It could be a coincidence.

Ben: There wouldn’t be that much of a coincidence, I don’t think.

Generally, the children were baffled as to why the sequence had been set up with all these interruptions, and could not see the point of it. Lauren (fourth grade) volunteered that it could be ‘to teach people the different sounds.’ Ben, again showing his unusual sophistication, identified the humor of the event and its narrative function:

Ben: It’s supposed to be kind of funny. Distractions—like, there wouldn’t be a point to the story if he taught him the piano by hearing like that.

As Table 7.1 shows, all the other incidents of children pressing the pause button were associated with these four events. The voice on the phone, identified as not real on six occasions, was an electronic squeaky voice—one of the interruptions to the piano lessons. The other events, picked up by only one or two children, were details of the treasure sequence (“they are not real jewels; there’s no such thing as treasure; they are not real pirates”). Ben (fifth grade) also argued that the cat in the stop-frame sequence was not real—and in fact, it was.

In summary, the children identified a variety of technical and theatrical effects in Sesame Street (“fast forwarding”; sound effects; stop frame animation; dressing up in a bird costume) as “not real”, and their reasons were generally drawn from real-world knowledge about the normal behavior of blocks, birds, and human beings. Underlying these reasons—and made explicit by a few articulate children—were objections to violations of artistic, rather than real-world, conventions, as in the use of a T instead of an X “to mark the spot”. In the case of the coincidental interruptions to the piano lesson, children drew on their own experience; they knew that it was unlikely for domestic activities to be interrupted with such regularity. Again, the more literate children—usually the oldest ones—were able to articulate why this was happening: for humorous and narrative effect. Younger children were much more likely than older ones to give idiosyncratic responses and reasoning, many of which, however, were evidence of imaginative thinking and, hence, were literate, if not accurate, responses. These responses illustrate that the critical-viewing-skills approach, which seeks to demystify the techniques of television, is not the same thing as encouraging literacy. Philip’s (first grade) comment that Big Bird was unrealistic because he was too fat to sit on the piano stool (rather than because he was “a guy in a costume”) represented intelligent and literate observation and reasoning at his own level. This was more relevant to him than a desire to deconstruct aspects of performance and costume would have been.

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