Comm 3490 Week 7

The idea that we are primed by the things we consume in the media is a litrle frightening. I personally don’t like the idea that I’m being unconsciously influenced by the shows I watch or the radio ads I hear. A much less scary way to think about it is considering the fact that most schema or mental frameworks that we encounter are based around expectations, things that we assume will happen. It’s less like we’re being influenced and more like there is a routine of things that we know and expect will happen. Scripts related to schema are specifically related to things happening in a certain order, just like we are told and have experienced that they will. Take going to see a movie in a theater, an outdated concept in these times, but still. We buy a ticket at the booth and we expect that there will be a theater and a seat waiting for us. Next, we go to the snack bar because we know that we want something to eat. Then, when we sit down to watch the movie, we turn our phones off. Commercials play, then trailers, then the movie itself, and then the credits. We would be quite confused if the trailers came on after the movie or the credits rolled instead of the commericals.

In real life, priming prepares our minds for storing information and jumpstarting automatic processes. I’ll follow the movie theme, in a scary film, when the music starts getting higher in pitch and more ominous, our bodies respond. We sweat, we get nervous, we put our hands over our eyes because the audio cue has told us to expect something. In romance movies, when the violins swell, we know without looking that the two main characters are probably embracing and we respond accordingly with either sighing or annoyedness depending on how we feel about romantic comedies. The cues that we hear tell our minds how we’re supposed to react, priming us for the correct response to what we hear on the screen. The reason why the musical backgrounds of a film can be so uniform in the way they are arranged is because film composers and directors know what we don't, that certain music elicits certain responses and they base their music around how they want us to feel in that particular moment.