Mediated unreality

We create our cultural and private worlds meaning through communicated presentations of realities "out there". By presenting endless portrayals of realities in its content, mass communications provide experiences from which we collectively shape our meanings. p31 Communicating unreality

Morgan & Shanahan (cultivation theory)
"If media content shapes our attitudes and cultivates our images of the world, it seems plausible that different media would shape different attitudes."

Loss of both 'reality and 'ideology' as grounding bases for images is another facet of the loss of the 'grand narrative'. A key consequence of this loss is the fragmentation of experience and its images. Postmodern culture is a fragmented culture, the fragments come together for the occasion and are not organized into stable coherent groupings by an external principle. p58 Communicating unreality

"There is no difference between image and reality"
John Fiske - Postmodernism and television

There is no unmediated acces to the real, and that it is the only through representations that we know the world. p170 Beginning Postmodernism

Most of the images are reconstructed realities. They often distort the "true" reality, poorly represent it, focus only on certain dimensions of the "real" situation or redefine it for their audiences. The meanings that are communicated depend on an interaction between the text and the reader. These meanings are dynamic, context-dependent and dependent on interpretation.

The audiences rely on mediated unreality and often accept it as "the world out there". p359 Communicating unreality

This is illustrated in the "Allegory of the Cave" by Plato: