Narrative in the Media.

·         Media Texts present different versions of the world through the ‘packaging’ of events and characters into stories sometimes stories are extended and developed and also they can be continuous. Narrative ‘snapshots’ or single narrative events can leave the viewers to make their own narrative, this is very effective for television.

·         Different narratives e.g. thrillers, ghost stories, dreams, jokes. Have certain common elements and different characteristics. And this shows the ‘blurred boundary’ between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’.

·         The difference between ‘story’ and ‘narration’ is that stories are told, in an order and a point of view. Same series will produce the same events also the characters will help produce different narratives if told to the codes and conventions for example a ‘joke, news’.

·         Stories need a narrator this helps organise and comment on the events taking place, this helps involves a point of view from which the characters are presented. It implies a listener or an audience helping the audience respond. It helps bring an order (start, middle, end) also a basic decision of type of story that’s being shown. Codes are also shown so they can perform certain distinctive functions (create suspense, provide setting to further the plot) different elements ‘mediate’ the construction or presentation of ‘reality’ in the film of television.

·         Narratives rely on the presentation of an initial state of order which is in some way disturbed, order and disequilibrium in relation to a particular problem or set of problems.  ‘Establishing a Problem à Elaboration of Problem à Resolution of the Problem’.

·         Nature of the problem and how it is resolved depends on what type of genre of the narrative, whether it involves a mystery for example. This can be applied to News Papers also it helps to present the News beginning with an initial order, through the disrupting or disrupted ‘other word’ of violence and death to the ‘end’ which promises some kind of authoritative explanation or satisfying sense of resolution. 

·         In Films and Television its seen that there isn’t a real narrator however the camera shots provide us, shot by shot a ordered sequence of images, which the viewers will ‘read’. Images may ‘denote’ one thing but in combination with others it will connote other things. This involves considering the role in which the viewers are ‘reading’ or ‘decoding’ the narrative.

Everything within a narrative has a particular function or serves a purpose- nothing is ever superfluous.