ABSTRACT
Falling in love with Lara Croft, shedding tears on Jack’s fi nal cry of ‘Never let go, Rose’ before sinking under icy waters (Titanic, 1997), cheering on Barack Obama’s election, shouting out loud to soccer player Ronaldo who fails to score, going over the moon while watching Jackson’s This is it – these examples are all about characters we almost exclusively know via the media, whom we have never met in real life, yet, we are clearly moved by them emotionally. In fact, many such characters, events, and narrations often are fi ctional constructions. This is considered a most intriguing phenomenon of today’s mass media – the potential to ‘play’ with our emotions while in fact nothing ‘real’ needs to be going on. Mass media are technically construed means to convey messages, yet they do not ‘have’ emotions themselves.
