Oldal 21 [21]
Within and Across the Media Borders
tions can be seen in Oroz. He describes multimediality of representations and how
various types of media focus on different aspects of presented character.
Moreover, means of expression in cinema are primarily picture and sound, but
they were not designed to inform about the reality. Press and television became the
primary source of information on ongoing events. Television was the most complex
information medium since it, for example in interviews, usually combined three
types of visuals as data: images, film, and archival materials.
However, movies watched by a large audience as in a cinema also played an in¬
creasingly important role in shaping a shared vision of the past as a series of images
taken from films (presented in Kaser), but it was televisions image of the world that
has broadened the worldviews of common folk, because of the mediums accessibil¬
ity and its recurrent character. Although in the discussed period, the small screen
continued a fragmentized way of depicting reality, over time, it has become more
and more important in creating both social and cultural meanings. It becomes
a way of spending time and a daily source of information. Annemarie Sorescu¬
Marinkovié shows the process of the increasing importance of television with an
example of the reception of TV channels from Yugoslavia and other neighboring
countries inside Romania.
Testimony of the Past: New Media and Deterritorialization of Images
Today we can only investigate the images displayed to the audience, which have
been preserved through the years. The images are, however, taken out of the con¬
text of the period in which they were created. Nevertheless they constitute a certain
testimony of the era in which they were produced. Analysis of visual media in the
focal period is a kind of a challenge, since contact with the media was for an aver¬
age person increasingly significant. Over the years, information coming from visual
media took on even greater importance and became the main source of informa¬
tion on reality and on the Other.
Since 1945, the world has been generally divided into two antagonistic West
and East alliances. Moreover, the process of globalization has resulted in changes
in mediating the experience of the Other. The Cold War made it difficult to com¬
municate and to travel, interpreting many world events unilaterally from the par¬
ticular point of view related to the place and the political and social relations in
it (Demski; Hristov; Nedelcheva). However, it is worth recalling that even during
this period there was some exchange of the “new” media and the global TV audi¬
ence—standing on both sides of the Cold War frontier—who could “together” to
watch many dramatic events, such as the first American landing on the Moon in
1969. Anthony Giddens links such opportunities directly to the development of
modernity: “An integral part of modernity are its “own” media: printed text at first
and then an electronic signal. The development and expansion of modern institu¬
tions were closely associated with unheard-of development of mediation experi¬
ence, which is involved in these forms of communication” (Giddens 2002: 35).
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