This study investigates the relations between narrative experiences and film enjoyment, and explores the possibility that transportability and perceived realism facilitate narrative experience and indirectly influence enjoyment. The study measured narrative experience and realism in three films from different genres. Results demonstrate that transportability, and both external realism and narrative realism positively influence at least one aspect of narrative experience, and that narrative experience in turn is a significant predictor for enjoyment.

An expanding media universe confronts readers, viewers, and users with an abundance of media content that, for the most part, will not be used by the audience, and will, in many cases, not even be considered for use. Selecting what to use and not to use is functional in avoiding information overload or ‘technostress’, but, at the same time, necessary to make use of the media environment. The selection of media initiates gratifications, serves particular functions, enables certain effects, all depending (...) on the perspective. Media use and selectivity constitute a field of remarkable tradition in communication research. The question how individuals deal with media and why they use certain media content has been in the focus of communication research from the very beginning of empirical media research; since Lazarsfeld and his colleagues conducted their radio research projects, which included Herzog's widely cited study on daytime serial listeners. Thinking about media use reached a first prime with the emergence of Uses and Gratifications approaches; an abundance of studies about ‘what people do with the media’ have been published during the golden years of Uses and Gratifications in the 1970s and 1980s. Bryant and Miron identified Uses and Gratifications – along with Agenda Setting – as the approach most frequently used in three communication journals from 1956 through 2000. (shrink)