Suchergebnisse

Interactive narratives are increasingly technologically possible and are expected to become an everyday form of entertainment, but for now actual implementations are rare. This 2 × 2 experiment compared dyadic (co-viewing) vs solitary emotional reactions watching either a linear or an interactive version of a seven-minute digital video narrative, Modern Cinderella. Eighty subjects were randomly assigned to each of the four conditions. People who watched the interactive version of Modern Cinderella reported higher enjoyment than those who watched the linear version. Story involvement, arousal and connection were not different across conditions. Those who experienced the interactive version were enthusiastic about being able to make choices. Interactive narratives appear to fall in-between high and low involvement. Co-viewing of the interactive narrative was different to solitary viewing. Those watching with another person thought less carefully about the choices and paid less attention. Solitary viewers were the more curious.

This study explored agenda-setting implications of indexing news content by topic. It was expected that indexing would diminish the power of mass media to set an audience agenda. An experimental version of a newspaper was created in which salience cues were removed and replaced with a topical index. The experimental and control versions of the newspaper were administered to more than 400 university student subjects. Results showed statistically significant differences in news topic exposure, but equivalently concentrated patterns of readership in the two versions. Rather than directing readers to stories based on editorially determined salience cues, the agenda set by the experimental version was based on ordering within the index and newspaper. Most readers of the indexed newspaper also evaluated it negatively, but a core of such readers liked the indexing, suggesting that different readership styles condition responses to information ordering in a newspaper.