The Virtual Family:
Urban Girls' Relationships
With TV Characters

Dawnja Burris

---

Thesis for the Master of Arts in Media Studies
The New School for Social Research - Summer 1996

Thesis Advisor:
Wolfgang Schirmacher, Ph.D.

Communication Department Chair:
Carol Wilder, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT

The phenomenon of the virtual family is a consequence of an artificial reality that we have embraced through our media. The events and the lives seen on television are reflections of ourselves and of our desires and motives. Through televisual texts and images, we continue to construct our lives. The virtual family is an example of the constructive mentality we employ as we develop and engage with our media.

This thesis is an investigation of a particular population of young urban women and their perceptions of the characters of television programs; how they receive, relate to and/or identify with them and how they may manifest their perceptions of the characters as virtual family members into their personal horizons of experience and lifeworlds.

In these pages I attempt to describe how the girls' perceived realities emerge both through the television experience and through lived physical experience and how these two realms interact and influence each other; how the girls regard certain television characters in their minds and into their lives and to what degree they do this. My main focus is upon the process of the girls' perception and the function of television's characters as virtual family members.

TABLE OF CONTENTS