The role of Mass Media to construct cosplayer self identity, social reality and hyper reality

Abstract

Mass Media have been acknowledged as a mean to shape the way people view the world. It indeed constructs the individual and social world. The evolution of human thinking is always changing as the development of media technology. Human creates communication technology as a tool to overcome the obstacles in communication. However, these tools are eventually shape human perspective to view the world. One of the content that people can see in mass media is culture. It spread massively through various mass media as a product and content. Through the mass media people can see other culture. From the culture they have seen in mass media, they eventually construct their own culture. One of the culture they have formed is cosplay. Therefore, this research is questioning about to what extent the mass media role had construct the reality of self-identity and social world of cosplayer. Secondly, how mass media had developed the hyper reality of cosplayer which it's reflected in cosplayer behavior. This paper had done with qualitative analysis. It means that the analysis did from the beginning until the end of the research. The result of this research shows that mass media, especially of video game and film have significant role to develop the cosplayer hyper-reality and identity. Those bring the cosplayer choose the character that represents their self-identity to play. Through this new identity, cosplayer forms the community to share their experience.