Does it Matter Where You Read? Situating Narrative in Physical Environment
Summary (2 min read)
Does it Matter Where You Read? Situating Narrative in Physical Environment
- People read them in various places, but never in a vacuum.
- It is a fact that the continuous reading of connected narrative belongs among the most complex processes the human mind is capable of accomplishing (e.g. Wolf & Barzillai, 2009) .
- I will attempt to modify this latter view by pointing at how the physical environment can interact, in the reader's consciousness, with the imaginary story world and other textual effects.
- The essay is divided into three main sections based on three different, but largely compatible, perspectives on the role of physical environment in reading.
- On this proposal, physical environment can support or inhibit a narrative in eliciting aesthetic pleasure, beyond the baseline variables of distraction and bodily discomfort.
The environment as distractor
- Speaking of different reading environments, attention and bodily comfort are perhaps the commonest concerns that spring to mind.
- Importantly, Schwitzgebel's findings warrant neither an exclusively thin nor an exclusively rich account of consciousness, but rather a third, moderate account; all participants in his study reported instances of absent peripheral experience as well as instances of more or less ample peripheral experience.
- While the relatively high attention demands of reading are well beyond dispute, sensory stimuli from the environment can still inform a reader's consciousness without necessarily disrupting the reading experience.
- Environment experiences occurring in the course of an experiment may be more likely perceived as distracting than analogous experiences occurring in a more natural setting.
- I will describe a process of environmental propping wherein distinct text effects in the reader's consciousness are reinforced precisely by the reader's peripheral experience of the environment -rather than by a sense of dissociation from this environment as suggested by established theories of narrative engagement, transportation, and absorption.
The environment as a prop for mental imagery
- You are reading Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, a story set on a steamer afloat the Congo River.
- The main reason why the activity of reading leaves us largely perceptually impoverished is that vision, the single sensory modality most important to environment exploration, is blocked.
- Let us consider the polar opposite of rich consciousness vis-àvis a given perceptual stimulus, e.g., the sound of water as it appears to you when you actively explore a fountain.
- While she was epistemically aware of her surroundings when she drove, she did not consciously perceive them.
- Environmental propping is not the only process wherein the narrative experience of a silent reader is affected by her peripheral consciousness of the immediate environment and vice versa.
The environment as a locus of pleasure
- People expose themselves to long-form narratives, especially fictional ones, for a variety of reasons.
- This immediacy distinguishes aesthetic pleasure from the more complex notion of enjoyment as known among media psychologists, including the authors of above-mentioned psychometric studies, who define enjoyment as an attitude toward an elapsed narrative experience rather than its intrinsic feature (Kuijpers et al., 2014) .
- That is, while medium complex narratives may have the capacity to generate pleasure in many different environments, highly complex narratives may require more pleasing environments.
- There is no reason why they should not, in principle, afford similar projections of aesthetic pleasure onto the environment.
- That is, relative complexity was rated as more pleasing only up to a point, after which it affected pleasure negatively.
SITUATING NARRATIVE 20
- With regard to narrative aesthetics, the intuitive appeal of Berlyne's and Sherry's proposals is obvious.
- To begin with, there are at least two different explanations implied in the view, dealt with earlier in this essay, that the environment affects reading experience primarily in its capacity of a distractor.
- On this explanation, highly complex narratives may elicit, as a rule, a richer mode of consciousness than medium or low complex narratives.
- On the train, you gave up on Heart of Darkness because the book did not generate enough intrinsic pleasure to keep you going, given the effort spent on comprehension.
- The Shining, on the other hand, had enough intrinsic pleasure to offer.
Conclusion
- An environmentally situated account of reading has implications for at least two different domains of activity: the practice of narrative reading as such, on the one hand, and experimental research, on the other.
- This essay has presented the reading environment in its three distinct capacities of distractor, imagery prop, and locus of pleasure.
- Environment manipulations for educational purposes should ideally be preceded by pilot tests in authentic classroom or reading room environments.
- Most types of self-report data, such as those underlying the psychometric studies cited in this essay, could still be collected with relative reliability.
- If subjects are free to locate their preferred fit between narrative and environment, it will be easier to have them read, and to read more naturalistically, longer stretches of narrative at a time.
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Cites background from "Does it Matter Where You Read? Situ..."
...Its findings would not only enrich our knowledge of the effects of a given textual feature, but also help overcome the challenges of collecting reader response data in laboratory environments (see also Kuzmičová, 2016)....
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"Does it Matter Where You Read? Situ..." refers background in this paper
...In the opening of this article I already cited one such psychometric item: “my body was in the room, but my mind was inside the world created by the story” (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009, p. 329; emphasis mine)....
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...…designed to measure narrative engagement and similar constructs feature items such Communication Theory 26 (2016) 290–308 © 2015 International Communication Association 291 as “my body was in the room, but my mind was inside the world created by the story” (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009, p. 329)....
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...In the study reported by Cupchik et al. (1998), emotionally complex narratives received higher pleasure scores compared to more straightforward materials....
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...However, researchers drawing on Gerrig’s account specifically make a point of suggesting that deep engagement with a story makes people lose “awareness of their surroundings” (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009, p. 325)....
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Frequently Asked Questions (9)
Q2. What is the main reason why the activity of reading leaves us largely perceptually imp?
The main reason why the activity of reading leaves us largely perceptuallyimpoverished is that vision, the single sensory modality most important to environment exploration, is blocked.
Q3. What is the common and often gratifying thing about the Transportation Scale?
Being so immersed in a narrative as to fail noticing a person entering the roomis one, rather common and often gratifying, thing.
Q4. What is the effect of environmental propping?
In a process of mutual propping, your auditory perception of real water merges with your auditory, visual, or multimodal (Kuzmičová, 2014) mental images of a river plowed by a nineteenth century steamer.
Q5. What is the relationship between interestingness and pleasure?
While interestingness ratings increased linearly with complexity, pleasure was related to complexity by an inverted U-shaped function.
Q6. What is the common misconception about the environment used in narrative response research?
The laboratory environments used in narrative response research are even typically thought of as free from extrinsic stimuli altogether.
Q7. What would be the way to get subjects to read?
For a more naturalistic reading experience, subjects could simply take the narratives to their preferred environmentsthe course of a study.
Q8. What is the role of environment in the study?
As for the particular role of physical environment, The authorhave previously suggested that laboratory settings may be more likely than natural environments to instigate a thin mindset, wherein subjects screen off any aspects of their experience that are not related to the experimenterimposed reading task.
Q9. What would be the natural consequence of adopting an environmentally situated approach to reading?
the most natural consequence of adopting an environmentally situated approach to reading would be to try and move the experiment outside controlled settings altogether.