ABSTRACT
Realism as an imperative, idea and concern, along with attendant concepts, can be found in debates about media representations everywhere. Collectively, we still seem to be obsessed with versions of ‘reality TV’, while computer games present an ever-heightened experience of the worlds they create – a ‘virtual’ reality – through rumble packs, enhanced graphics and surround-sound audio systems. Philosophers, too, continue to talk about our mediatised age as a ‘hyperreal’ one. Even concerns about media effects, we would argue, are in some way about the relation of media forms to reality. Realism then, is one of the most used of media studies concepts outside academic circles. Not everyone uses the term specifically but the concept is at the core of everyday evaluations of media texts and debates about the convincing (or otherwise) qualities of texts. It is at the heart of concerns about accuracy and balance in news reporting, objectivity, and certainly behind any reference to stereotyping and perceptions of certain social groups – issues which we dealt with in the previous chapter. We can see the scope of theories of the relation of the real, and its representation and allied concerns, if we consider a range of the senses comprised in any dictionary definition of the real:
existing or occurring in the physical world; not imaginary, fictitious, or theoretical; actual, true; not false (p. 827 of New Collins Dictionary (1987)).
