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14 Dagnostaw Demski in cooperation with A. Kassabova, I. Sz. Kristöf, L.Laineste and K. Baraniecka-Olszewska reception: the beliefin and the use of the representation in question. Because of these tensions and particularities, the authors of the articles in this volume attempt to address all the aspects of visual communication: the encoding of messages, the message itself (in its content and material form), and the reception and interpretation of it. Based on our findings we suggest that apart from the particular uses—for the aims of propaganda, entertainment, and so forth also the general use of visual data changed during the focal period. The representations not only concerned creating a certain imagery and belief about the phenomena of the surrounding world not experienced directly but they constituted/could be regarded as a manner of handling reality. We can observe a certain shift roughly after WWII—a process of moving from “belief in” to a “reality of” the representations—namely to the function of documenting reality. This process enables us to understand the specificity of the media’s function at that time. Materiality is also an important level of analysis related to a particular medium. Elizabeth Edwards emphasized this aspect relative to photography and its uses (Edwards & Hart 2004). Although this aspect was not developed further by the authors of these chapters, it does not deny the relevance of this level of analysis. The tools of the new media for describing the changing world shaped the imagery in general and resulted in the previous images being newly formed. Furthermore, these media changed their (political and social) context and constructed new Others. During the period of the 1940s to the 1970s, the number of media and their influence were continually expanding. New media—film technology and television—developed and started to occupy peoples everyday lives. A history of visual media shows that early on images took the form of drawings, paintings, sculptures, caricatures, and posters and then expanded through photography, press, cinema, television. Images were experienced rarely, at first; later they were more often published in newspapers, journals, leaflets, and posters, and still later became an everyday consumption in the form of the television. Initially, broadcasting took only a few hours in the evening and on one channel only; later it expanded to all day programming on multiple channels. Television replaced other sources of information, offering the public more and more news from the world. This fact has lead us to the pivotal question of what creates the experienced reality and how. How was the everyday human experience shaped? What was the role of the visual media in it? In order to find answers to these questions, we have to look at the characteristics of the particular kinds of visual media. The Variety of Visual Media Although visual representations are not exact reflections of the surrounding real. . a: » . . . ity, they constitute a certain “window”, perceived metaphorically, through which people can watch the ongoing events and their reflections. As we mentioned above, in drawings and photographs the image is frozen, while in a movie we can be “stare through a window directly at past events, to experience people and places as if we
