Page:Culture.vs.Copyright 01.pdf/77

 Kappa: They all are fools, ha ha ha. But listen, Beta, you contradict yourself. You said a few minutes ago that the two stories have different relations to reality, didn’t you?

Alpha: The fiction writer can write about his dreams, what the world could be like. The journalist writes about reality.

Beta: Yeah, Kappa, you are right. It is clear that the goals are different, but the real jobs are so similar. . . . I am going back and forth and in circles.

Gamma: We are all going in circles, but I’ve got a funny idea about journalism. It is impossible to write about the present. It is always about the past, a near past, but still the past.

Beta: Physically. But people do perceive it like it is happening now. Like it can all be fixed right away.

Alpha: Come on! Fixed? Somebody got killed—go fix that!

Gamma: It is always a kind of illusion. However, like Kappa said, it is a rule of the game, the journalism game. A reader should get the feeling that action should be taken, that something can be fixed, that justice must be restored.

Teacher: All right, so let there be another circle. Isn’t it the same with fiction?

Alpha: Like in Stargate, ha ha ha.

Gamma: Like in Stargate. The difference is that those fictitious events are substitutes for real ones, and thus, they stand for general ideas while events reported in a newspaper are what they are in reality. Ah! All of this was already said today!

Kappa: Yes, but it is amazing how differently things look in the beginning of a discussion from how they look after a while. My first impression was that fiction and newspaper articles have nothing in common. Then we started to analyze them. The journalist writes about current events, but the fiction writer can very well write about these too. The journalist wants an action to be taken, and the writer can desire this too. The writer organizes his reality so as to engage the public, the journalist does the same. The writer can turn to the past or future, the journalist can do the same to make his point. The only real difference we saw is in how the public perceives their writings. If it is fiction, the public becomes concerned with fictitious events but feels