The Mirage Project: An Experimental Qualitative Reception Study

Abstract

The Mirage Project focuses on how readers ascribe meaning to the pictures in the newspaper. The conventions of the newspaper as regards truthfulness, reliability and authenticity see the photograph as data, as information. But the photograph is more than that. Through the project sixteen informants' reception of four different pictures are analyzed in relation to the news articles to which they belong. Through the use of different visual variants for the same article the reader gets the possibility to be critical and to choose between different pictures. Mirage gathers this chaos of the readers' choices and arguments for their choices through a series of analyses. In the light of the new digital culture the reader makes a different frame of understanding than newspaper conventions normally offer. The readers are disobedient. They have other values and other demands on quality than expected. This article is a presentation of a reception project where the experimental method is developed to extend the semiotic meaning potential and partly defines the readers' values and preferences.