Abstract
The place where most of us face the perception of reality in the pre-internet social life consists of a miraculous glowing box in the focal point of our rooms. Television is perhaps one of the most basic media tools that create our perception of reality by using the power of sound and image. The urge to believe what you see continues to make us addicted to this device. Television audience surveys in Turkey show that Turkish people watch television for an average of 4.5 hours a day. Considering that the average person works 8 hours a day and sleeps 8 hours, it is understood that people spend more than half of their free time in front of the television. With the use of the internet in all areas of social life, an average of 3 hours of leisure time consumption of people is devoted to social media. This situation reveals that television has a very serious competitor in directing our perception of reality. This study is about the construction of reality in the Survivor program, which is the most consumed competition program on Turkish television.
TopCommunication systems cover the process of creating specific coding systems and making sense of the designed coding systems. One of the essential communication tools of daily life, which we create to communicate, on which we reach consensus, is letters and graphic systems, that is, language. According to Özbay (2005, p. 68), language; Requires listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. These four skills constitute the most crucial distinction distinguishing human beings from other beings. At the same time, language is an organism in which a person can express herself and what is going on around her.
Man is a social being, and the instinct to tell requires the construction of such structures. The construction process is a gradual process that takes time. Koç states that children can understand the primary graphic and sequencing structure of the language created when they are 3-4 years old. In the following periods, children gain the ability to differentiate and organize these graphics and sequences as more complex structures. After a while, they learn how to benefit from the rich possibilities of the language by establishing relationships of place, time and reason about the developments in their environment. They acquire this skill from the narratives they have known from the stories since their early ages (51: 1993).
Narrative is a form of construction. According to Atabek, the cornerstone of the construction process is communication. In this respect, narrative is accepted as one of the essential elements that make up culture like language (1992, p. 339). All kinds of experiences obtained from experiences are multiplied and shared with narratives. Çetin states that when people could not store their information with permanent texts such as writing, they used narratives to store, organize and transmit information (1999, p. 8). Yücel bases the narrative on words. According to him, it is possible to evaluate the statements containing the word as a kind of narrative (1988, p. 14). On the other hand, according to Yılmaz, a literary text is not a narrative; therefore, not every narrative may have a literary content (2017, p. 693). These two approaches constitute the primary distinction of narratology studies that focus on the theory of narrative structures.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Survivor: It is a television show that combines reality show and competition format.
New Generation Audiences: With the increase in internet and social media usage, passive tracks express the change of the audience. New tracks consist of individuals influenced by mass broadcast content and influence those contents.
Television and Narrative: Expresses the story structure created by using the unique features of television.
Twitter: A communication platform that destroys geographical boundaries where the masses can make their voices heard.
Post-Truth: The new reality of the online world appeals to the senses. A new space where emotions replace reality.