Hard News Cognitive Shift: from Facts to Narratives

Resumo

This article discusses whether and how hard news stories represent the immediate reality. It suggests that random bits of hard information morph into episodic intrigues when audiences cognitively assemble a disorderly media flow of information into a chronological episode. Active audiences proceed this way, it is assumed, because the narrative frame (the plot construction) is a powerful cognitive device which people naturally use to organize diffuse and confused social reality. Five preliminary hypotheses on how random hard information turns into subjective coherent intrigues are presented. The paper concludes that hard news configures unstable intrigue matrixes rather than neat narratives. Those matrixes seem to be exploratory foresights about the chaotic reality rather than tangible imaginary stories, however.