From: Fiona Moore nydersdyner@yahoo.co.uk

Well, no. We don't genuinely *see* different things on the screen, except

in

the case of occasions when one person is watching a cut-down version and

the

other one isn't. When I watch "Games," I see exactly the same visual

images

that Neil sees when he watches "Games," that Una sees when she watches "Games," <snip> It seems to me that when you are using the word "see," you

are using it in

the sense in which other people on the thread have been using the word "interpretation." And there I *would* agree with you: two people can see

the

same images and come up with wildly divergent interpretations. But that's

a

different issue entirely.

I would get even more pedantic and suggest a difference between vision and perception. Perception is what interpretation is built upon. Yes, in terms of dot by on-screen dot, different viewers do literally see the same images. It's the same pattern of light falling onto the retina. But what people see is not necessarily what they perceive.

If I'm walking through the local housing estate and I see the pigeons and starlings go bananas, I know there's a Sparrowhawk about, and if it's not hedge-hopping through leafy suburbia I'll probably spot it. Other people will just peceive pigeons and starlings going bananas and probably won't even wonder why. Most probably won't even perceive the flurry of activity that to me says 'Sparrowhawk!' in big neon letters, yet the image of the birds still gets into their eyes and reaches the back of the brain, where it promptly gets filtered out by the spam trap - unimportant, uninteresting, unworthy of attention.

People perceive what they either want to or need to, and we can doubtless all think of countless examples when it's happened to us. It doesn't have to be a conscious process. Indeed, if you steer your brain in a certain direction, the senses start to run on autopilot. The only time I've seen a stork in Britain, I wasn't birding at all. I was shopping. I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't looked up, and I only looked up because I could hear the gulls going berserk. Most people spamtrap noisy seagulls because they're a bleeding nuisance. To me they're a cue to start scanning the skies.

We do the same when watching B7. You notice what interests you. This isn't the same as seeing what you want to see: that is an interpretive process (eg; if you want to see a callous manipulative Blake, then you will tend to interpret Blake's actions on the assumption that he *is* callous and manipulative). Subconscious selective perception is all about extracting the raw material on which interpretations are based. If character dynamics are your thing, then that's what you'll notice. If you're into ideological subtexts, you'll notice them instead. Likewise, you overlook the things that are not of particular interest, even though you see (or hear) them. In my case it would be cruisy looks from Dorian, amongst other things. And the Sevencylopaedia entry for Birds shows that my ornithological radar remains active even when I'm slumped in front of the telly. Did you hear the chirruping Linnet in Games? Yes, you did. But did you notice it?

I know this is all rather obvious, but then the obvious can be easily overlooked.

So Sally's got a point - there is no universal canon, shared by all viewers, because we each individually extract different elements of focus *prior to* the construction of our individuated altercanons. Our attention is consciously or subconsciously pulled in particular directions. This was pointed out very clearly to me by Iain's performance workshop at Redemption, where he - as an amateur actor - could point to an instance of appallingly bad acting that I've never noticed before despite seeing it a dozen times or more. He could look up and see the stork, while my eyes were firmly glued to the pavement.

Neil