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Audience involvement and parasocial interaction can also occur
in more than one sub-dimension at the same time, which are shown
in previous research. Analyzing the content of letters written to
“Hum Log” (We People”), an entertainment-education
soap opera broadcast in India, Sood and Rogers (2000) conclude that
the three levels of interaction and the two types of involvement
are interrelated. They actually cannot categorize 16% of the letters
as either critical or referential, therefore the category applied
to the letters are critical/referential. In a study of audience
involvement with a radio soap opera “Tinka Tinka Suckh”
(Happiness Lies in Small Things) Sood (2000) describes that there
is an overlap of referential-affective and cognitive-critical involvement
in the survey responses. In the present research, the messages are
categorized according to the most prevalent sub-dimensions of parasocial
interaction exhibited. Some messages reflect more than one category;
this will be reflected in the final overall result analysis. For
instance, analyzing the first example cited, the affective interaction
becomes obvious:
GRRRRRRR!!! I was BEYOND FURIOUS when I saw Said give his bedroom
key to Nazira, making Jade look like a chump. All of la Medina would
have heard me cursing and screaming, that’s for sure! If there’s
one thing I value….it’s my PRIVACY. That would have
been the end of the marriage. HAH! I would never tolerate my husband
putting his sister before me like that. No way toots! No way in
hell would I tolerate such a marriage. I would have packed my bags,
said “Feet, don’t fail me now”, and I would have
never looked back. How outrageously infuriating!
But it also exhibits referential involvement, with the writer expressing
how she would act in the same situation as the character Jade. Therefore,
for the purposes of the study, the messages are categorized according
to the sub-dimensions more strongly expressed. In an attempt to
actually reflect the complexities of the messages and of the audience
involvement exhibited, the qualitative analysis will supply additional
information concerning the intricacies of the messages.
There are also nuances in the levels of the sub-dimension of parasocial
interaction. As in the example of “Simplemente Maria”,
viewers dressing up to attend the wedding of the two main characters
show a high degree of behavior interaction, while in other instances,
it does not go to this extreme. An important example from “Simplemente
Maria” that can also be correlated to behavioral interaction
is the large number of maids that enrolled in literacy and sewing
classes, as the main character of the telenovela did. This phenomenon
can also be related to empowerment and self-efficacy concepts.
The theoretical framework that anchor this research, formulated
by the combination of social learning theory and dialogical communication,
is materialized with the utilization of the main concept of the
parasocial interaction sub-dimension model suggested by Sood &
Rogers (2000) to qualitatively analyze the content of messages posted
in the “El Clon” Telenovela-World forum. The vicarious
learning notion is evident when writers express how they affectively
interact with characters and/or how they learn from the novela.
The fact that the forum participants are already engaging in interpersonal
communication through the messages that they post, and therefore,
in a true dialogical sense learning from one another also helps
to solidify the theories that guide this research. The critical
commentaries and the display of actions taken stemming from the
telenovela viewing or the forum participation corroborate the concepts
of empowerment and self/collective-efficacy.
As described earlier, it is important to emphasize that researchers
argue that media needs to be combined with interpersonal communication
to bring change (Rogers, 1983). As Papa et. al. (2000) state:
The mass media alone seldom effect individual change, but they
can stimulate conversations among listeners, which create opportunities
for social learning as people, individually and collectively, consider
new patterns of thought and behavior (p. 33)
The difficulty in studying telenovelas’s influence under
the prism of media effects or even reception studies is to isolate
the phenomenon. In the day-to-day life of the audience there is
much input and feedback received from different sources. In Brazil
for example, it is practically impossible to rule out the primary
source of influence, since the novelas are not only part of the
social conversations, in the home, at work, at school, but they
are also in the press, in television news, and even in the parliamentary
speech. One might not watch the telenovela, yet cannot escape the
subject. The topic will always surface. In this research, this challenge
is also present when trying to elucidate the influence of the telenovela
“El Clon” under the foundation of the Internet forum.
This can be viewed as one of the research limitations. However,
if we take the premise postulated by Rogers (1983) that media needs
to be coupled with interpersonal communication; the study of the
telenova influence through the discussion forum can also be seen
as a strength, since it analyses the communication of messages between
posters in a dialogical format. With the understanding that it is
not possible to dichotomize the media-interpersonal communication
effects, the aim of this study is to do an investigative work encompassing
these two modes of communication.
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