The “ludic-affective” and dramatic character of audiovisual language1 Valerio Fuenzalida School of Communications Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile 2013 [email protected] Introduction 1. Receivers involvement in different languages 2. Iconic-indicial representation in audiovisual language 3. Features of audiovisual language in cinema and TV 3.1. Concrete visual signs 3.2. Dynamic and temporary signs 3.3. Informational richness 3.4. Affective potential 3.5. Polysemy 3.6. The code of the spoken word 3.7. Musicalization 3.8. Polidiscursivity in genres 3.9. Associative and constructivist perception 3.10. Reintroduction of ludic-festive popular culture 3.11. Cultural hybridization 3.12. Specific semiotic-cultural efficiency of the new language 3.13. Multimedia digital convergence Abstract This text shows the specificity of the audiovisual language, originally in cinema and TV, but today ubiquitous on different screens because of the digital electronic convergence. In this article, we will present the semiotic characteristics of this language, first through examination of the evolution of the five major stages of human languages (gestural, oral, reading-writing, audiovisual, digital). Evolution in the nature of communication signs at every stage not only shows differences in their materiality, but also in sensorial perception relationship with human being; each language involves audiences differently. Secondly, we will analyze the specific characteristics of audiovisual language and their differences with the reading-writing language 1 This text is an update of chapter three of the book Televisión y Audiencia en America Latina (Television and Audience in Latin America). Valerio Fuenzalida. Editorial Norma. 2002. Buenos Aires. prevailing for centuries in Western culture and its socio-cultural changes involving audiences; finally the complexities associated to the current digital language. Introduction Chapter two of the book Televisión y Audiencia en America Latina (Television and Audience in Latin America - Fuenzalida, 2002) stated the importance about home as situation of regular TV reception, whether by television or Internet screen. It was argued that without understanding home situation in TV reception we can’t understand the TV-audience relationship. But in addition to home, there are other situations for TV reception: the classroom for formal educational TV, groups with segmented interests who watch video programs in special showrooms, emissions in waiting rooms of medical offices, hospitals, airports, subway, and others; finally the current situation of ubiquity in cell phones and tablets, and soon the ubiquity permitted by the nipo-Brazilian digital standard in Latin America for buses, cars, trains, etc. Reception situation, in fact, affects the production of television programs. Broadcast TV is committed to offering attractive programs to an audience located at home and potentially available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This audience relates to TV programs and makes decisions about them in very different ways compare to audience that decide to leave home to attend a production exhibited in a cinema, a theatre, a concert, or a room institution. To produce programs attractive to audiences at home, some updated TV producers are interested about knowing the audiences in their everyday lives at home. It is currently known, for example, that pay TV audiences have segmented preferences and life rhythms at home different from broadcast TV audiences. In addition to home situation, a second relevant factor to understand the TV-audience relationship is the semiotic-cultural condition of audiovisual television language. And this will be analyzed in this text. When Eliseo Verón pointed out that the main signifier in audiovisual language is the 'significant body' or semiotic body (Verón, 2001) he meant that the receiver and the audience are semiotically represented within the audiovisual language. The signic structure of Peircean origin includes the interpretation in the logical reception within the sign (interpretant-sign of another sign) and not as an external interpretant. From there aroused the concept of involvement of the receiver inside the language, and thus opens a broad theme for both the analysis of each language as for their diachronic evolutionary history. The analysis, indeed, it has been already done for representation of audience inside texts; the contribution of Verón for involvement gets a step further back of the texts and genres: towards languages. The audience involvement (and the possibility of interaction) not only occurs with unique texts but previously with languages. And these poses to analyze what differential types of involvement occur in different languages, the different relationships with the receiver, and the consequences for communication. The analysis of involvement will point out that some reception relations are, therefore, already imbedded in languages, and thus tend to interact (in a non-deterministic way) with some active competencies of the audiences. Conceptually we will understand audiences as a synonym for receivers: people and social groups as subjects; reception is instead understood as interactive processes in which those audiences engage with texts and languages, both as practitioners and users. 1. Receivers involved in the different languages A first aspect to be presented is a brief look at the historical evolution of human languages and the internal relations established with receivers. The historicalsemiotic analysis of languages shows five major stages with different signs of communication and different relationships with the receiver. a) The first stage of the human language communicates trough facial-gestural signs, produced concrete-bodily, issued in person and without technological mediations; communication with gestures tends to involve the human receiver group towards collaborative events, basically to ensure food, defense of dangers, pairing, and care of the group; facial-gestural communication involves the receiver emotionally with a pragmatic intention (Stokoe, 2004; Wilson, 1998). Since the double articulation in monemas and phonemes as defining human oral language (Martinet, 1960), it has been discussed whether sets of signs without double articulation (such as gestures and audiovisual) would be languages. Metz (1972) already defended the difference between language and discourse (langue); human discourse shows the double articulation enounced by Martinet, but there are languages (such as audiovisual) without double articulation: they are not only discourses but they are languages since they have signs and syntax for expressing and communicating. Stokoe (2004) also defends that the system of gestural signs with hands is a language without double articulation, since it has signs and syntax, different to oral language; gestural signs do not transcribe each phoneme, but monemas and sentences; many gestures already contain syntax or indications of conduct, for example. Stokoe points out that the gestures express a cultural perception different from orality and, therefore, he is among adversaries to learning lip reading for deaf-mute people. Human brain developed over thousands of years special abilities to interpret emotionality and the pragmatic nature of facial-corporal signs: amygdale brain center reads emotions in faces (friendship, love and enmity). Current technique of medical imaging shows that human brain does not perceive social and human environment with a proportional scale according to Euclidean geometry but that greatly amplifies certain areas such as the human face and the hand (which can occupy up to three-quarters of the perceptual map). Medical imaging has also shown that autism is linked to a brain inactivity of the autistic individual towards human faces; the inability of pragmatic-emotional relationship is associated with the inability to perceive faces. Such neuro-cerebral skills to perceive emotional gestures seem to be at the base of universality of emotional readings inferred from the human face, present for years in the work of Paul Ekman (2006). Facial-gestural signs perceived visually imply in a highlighted way emotionalpragmatic aspects in the interaction emitter-receiver. It is the first version of the significant body and without technological mediation. The primacy of gestures allows presuming that corporal expression was the first form of artistic expression in conjunction with primitive rhythms and sounds, still pre linguistic. From there it evolved into primitive dance, maintaining this links towards emotional and pragmatic aspects between emitter and receivers. Gestural manual handling generated work tools and ritual objects (drawings, carvings, sculptures with different materials), from which plastic art emerged. b) Thousands of years in human evolution caused somatic changes that allowed oral language to appear approximately 130,000 BC; the size of the brain reached 1400 cm3, allowing the development of the necessary areas for processes of symbolization; at the same time, erect posture of the head allowed phonation in larynx. The second stage in the evolution of languages starts with primary orality (orality without reading and writing) where communicational interaction is enacted through abstract and transit phonic signs; verbal signs are on one hand emitted phonically, so facial-corporal gestures cease to be the only communicational sign; the relationship of visible gestures (gestures + eyes) is combined with a phonic-hearing interaction (Beaken, 1996). Unlike gestural signs that are visually perceived, phonic signs involve the audience hearing: con-vocare the voice that brings together. On the other hand, phonic signs are able to abstract from concrete and singular materiality allowing moving towards abstraction and conceptual generalization. Oral narrative starts bearing, and joining gestures emerges the ludic and public festivity with musical sounds, singing, dance, and theater; all activities that involve audiences (Ong, 1982). c) From 3,200 BC there are experiments with numbers in Sumer, thus emphasizing the process of generalizing abstraction from the concrete singular. During the first BC Millennium the third stage of reading and writing expands objectifying phonichearing signs in numbers and letters, also abstract signs, but they are once again perceived in a visual mode; the objectification emancipates the text from the presence of the receiver and enables its dissemination (oral narration becomes written, the manuscript book appears); the abstract signs drive arithmetic and mathematics, grammar, scientific and philosophical abstraction. In the 15th century AC, the industrialization of the book by printing standardizes not only texts but a new reception way of silent individual reading and individual interpretation of the text, generating a massive cultural environment conducive to personal comprehension of the biblical message, advocated by the Reform; readingwriting language, in strong expansion due to technology, gives a great boost to novel genre, schooling, newspapers, individual rights, the criticism of monarchy and the struggle for political democracy. d) The fourth stage of cinema and TV creates the audiovisual language produced technologically in dynamic texts; old concrete and gestural signs are reintroduced, but they no longer interact in person but are technologically produced, involving the audience with a semiotic representation of iconic-indicial character. The 'significant body' is mediated by the audiovisual technology, but gestures perceived visually retain the emotional implication, accentuated by the musicalization. The vocal orality of radio and audiovisual introduce the second convening orality (radiobroadcasted orality, popular music massified, audiovisual narrative). Audiovisual stage causes a huge crisis to the written logocentrismo that had prevailed for 2,400 years in Western culture. Audiences are less involved in their capability to conceptualize with abstraction; representation by iconic-indicial signs accentuates the emotional relations of recognition or ignorance, identification or affective distance. Human corporality represented as a dynamic show (and displayed visually on huge screens) and with a narrative of singular stories dissolves conceptual abstraction (for example, about eroticism), and represents it in concrete bodies involving emotional recognition and identification processes. It is a language that involves audiences synesthetically. e) In fifth and current phase, digital language introduces multimedia linguistic convergence (audiovisual, alphanumeric writing, touch operability), ubiquity in the emission/reception, and global networking; the complex new language involves the receiver less as an audience rather than as an active multimedia operator able to build virtual networks. In the last two stages there is a new off-center from the text towards receiver activity (Crowley & Heyer, 1997; Briggs & Burke, 2002). With video games occur the maximum operability of the user, and the concept of receiver fades even more. If concrete audiovisual language with singular image sign offered a new perspective to conceptual abstraction, digital language (individually operating and globalizing) questions the magisterial authority expressed in literary texts of universal value. This questioning to authority (authority typical in the stages of oral memory) is reinforced by the ease that children and youth have to dominate digital and audiovisual technologies. 2. The iconic-indicial representation in the audiovisual But the involvement way of audiovisual language, along with is global massification and its digital convergence, deserves some further development. From photography to the dynamic audiovisual image, technology has introduced an unprecedented representation of the receiver: signs technologically produced (not by human operation of plastic production) with an iconic-indicial character; technology reproduces traces of the concrete-particular reality (Schaeffer, 1990; Carlón, 2006). Such indexicality has substantiated the "realist" theories about the audiovisual. But, on the other hand, human brain has an own internal design that makes it differentially sensitive to human body and face, and to movement; facialcorporal language is emotionally portrayed by receiver’s neuro-cerebral abilities; in audiovisual era, such affective-emotional interaction is technologically mediated, quantitatively massified and qualitatively amplified by the capacities of new expressive media (music, color, planimetry, and others). Neuroscience has given another blow to logocentric rationalism by arguing that evidence shows that human consciousness and communication have a first emotional substrate, which is obvious in infants, but which persists throughout life. Babies, indeed, do not have rational-linguistic consciousness, but an emotionalcorporal consciousness which communicates with gestures, shouts and moves to express needs and satisfaction. Consciousness begins as sentiment, according to Damasio (2000) formulation, and it aims not only to an essential capacity to live for infants, but indispensable in all stages of human life; brain pathology shows indeed that subjects damaged in brain areas processing emotions (but intact in rational areas) have serious problems to perform well in work and everyday life. Even in acts of conscious and linguistically perceiving there are a primary emotional perception at base, which is valued as important to live properly; i.e., according to Damasio, human perception structure (ontogenetically and existentially) is bi-perceptual: emotional and rational. The Damasio bi-perceptual conception about origin and permanent emotional-corporal foundation of the self and consciousness radically questions rationalistic conceptions based on spoken word as raiser of conscience and individuality, but also separating and alienating. Francisco Varela also associates human consciousness to emotional-corporal perception (Varela, 2005; Varela et al. 1997, 2001). According to new appretiating conceptions of emotion, this is a form of knowledge that allows perceiving aspects different to the ones of cognitive rational-Apollonian perception, and is also a motivating principle of active behavior.2 Emotional motivation constitutes a basic constitutive energy for person development and their action capacity in life (Izard 1978; Buck 1984, 1988; Damasio 1996). From these new appretiating conceptions of emotional perception, based on neurobiology, come thematic developments, first under the name of "emotional intelligence" (Goleman, 2001 - contradictory syntagm for orthodox rationalism), and then under the theory of multiple intelligences (Gardner, 2003). The Spanish philosopher Xavier Zubiri from philosophical speculation had advanced towards the formulation of the "feeling intelligence" (1980-1983), receiving a cold welcome; today these philosophical speculations are solidly supported by neurobiology; through imaging, neuroscience has discovered the importance of emotionality for human communication, in maternal-infant stage, for memory and learning, and for social relations (Lavados, 2012, 2009). The current interest and valorization of West culture for human emotionality for the proper understanding of person, of environment, and professional and social relations, emerge at this stage where audiovisual language intensified and massified the special emotional implication of the significant body with audiences3. Cultural consequences of audiovisual indicial representation are enormous: social macro passage in West from abstract rationality to emotional audiovisual and digital 2 There has been in Judeo-Christian tradition an important presence of "affective knowledge". The verb "to know" appears in old stories of Genesis in a usual meaning of sexual intercourse, that is, a less intellectual "knowledge" and more an affective-experience of a person: 'Adam knew his wife Eva, who conceived and gave birth to Cain' (Gen. 4.1). The same affective meaning appears in St. John letters where he writes that anyone who loves knows God and who does not love does not know God (1 Jn. 4.7). Correlatively, both in Old and New Testament, not knowing the true God and the idols worship is called "prostitution". The metaphor emphasizes that idolatry is not a mere cognitive-intellectual relationship. 3 Emotional deficiencies can generate a new type of character-villain, more complex than the usual stereotypes. Indeed, two current television series have two very interesting protagonists because of the contrast between their professional skills and their poor emotional intelligence to relate with others and to lead a fuller life: Dr. House (USA, 2004, Universal) and Doc Martin (United Kingdom, 2006, Film Arts). Reception studies on telenovelas show the interest of audience in fictional villains and the social conversation emerging from it. operability, with emergence of photogenic, the enhanced corporal-erotica expression, audiovisual star system, audiovisual cultural industries, etc.4. Languages, then, are not equal among themselves. They have signs of diverse nature to perceive and to express different aspects of the material-cultural world and with various implications towards the receivers; they relate thus to different human abilities/needs of audiences. There are broader relationships than differences in human perceptual sensory and in social communication instrumentality. 3. Features of audiovisual language in cinema and TV Audiovisual language has industrial and socio-semiotics features. From the point of view of its origin, it can only be produced and broadcasted through electronic machines; it is put in existence with an industrial process (machines, operators, physical spaces, economic support, and other aspects); this all refers to reproduction problems (cultural consumption and economic funding) in the audiovisual actorindustry in general. The optical-electronic processing of this visual image allows a growing manipulation (and not only registration) that already exceeds the name of 'special effects' and rather refers to creation of a "virtual reality". Electronic processing has also perfected visual animation technics, which accentuates an aesthetic of autonomous visual creation and less referential analogy. But television broadcast introduces another industry dimension: the emission in continuous time temporality; because the audience located at home is potentially available in everyday time there is now a concept of daily and weekly programming (first introduced by radio); from this temporality of radio and TV has emerged the serial programming and production: series with weekly episodes, telenovela with daily episodes, news during certain daily times, stripped programs in the morning and evening. Such a way of production in serial display is very different to the unique work in theater and cinemas. These differences have resulted in harsh disputes that initially have refused the artistic character TV serial works; only the unique work of 4 It has already been said that languages, by variously involving audiences, create cultural environments more conducive to development of some human skills. The constructivist activity of the receiver when interacting with the texts of the languages excludes the linguistic and textual determinism; handling various languages and consumption of various texts generates cultural environments with greater richness of perspectives for audiences; in fact, today the concept of communicational 'effect' (taken from deterministic classical physics) is being abandoned for the concept of communicational "influence", more flexible since it includes social environment. To assert the influence of languages to create more likely cultural environments, by the implication of the receivers, and to simultaneously affirm the receivers activity creates a tension of constructivist interaction; tension that shows better than a deterministic relationship, on the contrary, a random one. cinema and theatre could be artistic. We can remember the influential Goddard statement that TV is only a media for exhibition not for artistic expression. We will only mention this industrial aspect of television language, since this text will focus on its socio-semiotic characteristics. From the point of view of its intrinsic sígnica constitution, for years filmology and socio-semiotics have endeavored (in tune with the 20th century interest in languages) to discover the specific characteristics of signs in this audiovisual language (see, among many others: Munier, 1964; Communications No. 15, 1970; Garroni, 1975; Eco, 1976; Dudley Andrew, 1978; Fiske & Hartley, 1978; Ong, 1982; Aumont, 1992; Vilasuso, 2001). This socio-semiotic approach explores the psycho-social dynamics of language and relieves their differential specific features in relation to reading-writing language, thus appearing the new potentials and also limitations inherently emanating from television language in its relation to an audience in a peculiar situation of receiving, as it is usually at home. Television reception situation at home stress audiovisual language towards an aesthetic specificity, different to films made for cinema screens; audiovisual works produced to be exhibited in classrooms also have special rules of realization and display, appropriate to this particular situation of cultural reception (Tosi, 1993); there is also a different specificity in relation to artistic videos or audiovisual works for social animation, programs to be exhibited for groups in special rooms; i.e., here it appears the mark of different reception situation on the television language production. Not only audiovisual language is different from reading-writing, but in its television variant tends to differentiate from audiovisual language of cinema and video. Let's review some socio-semiotic features of audiovisual language, and specifically of television. 3.1. Concrete visual signs Audiovisual signs are analog/indicial images of concrete and particular people and things; color image adds a strong dose of realism and concreteness to the analogy; oral words, on the other hand, are intangible, abstract phonic and transient signs, which are perceived by ear; written words are materially objectified signs and that is why they are visually perceived; both phonic and written signs are abstract, that is, there is no analogy (but no-motivation) between the meaning and the abstract sign; by this de-concretion and objectification, oral/written words allow the abstracted generalization from the particular, and thus constitute the semiotic basis of science and philosophy. In exchange, because of their singular characteristics, analog images are better suited for visual spectacle, and for indicial non-verbal or gestural communication in living beings, gestures that (as already said) has strong emotional impact5. Concrete and indicial audiovisual image is the material foundation that enables the receiver to give a stronger credibility to these signs (Barthes, 1961; 1972) and it is also the basis of realistic audiovisual aesthetics (Bazin, 1966). Semiologist Verón (2001) has emphasized that finally TV communication is enacted through particular significant bodies; singular bodies and faces, oral and visually appearing on screen, constitute the television signs of communication. The very nature of new visual-television language shows semiotically different expressive capabilities and limitations, confronted with the potential of oral language and reading-writing language6. 3.2. Dynamic and temporary signs Audiovisual signs of cinema and TV are not static but dynamic: they appear “ex se” in a temporal sequence that concretizes in a film or in a television program of determined duration, and in the sequential programming of a channel; "images developed in time", as they are called by Aumont (Aumont, 113); this temporary dynamism differentiates audiovisual messages from a photograph, a painting, a graphic image (non-developed in time images), and also of a newspaper or magazine and a sculpture, works in which the signs are unfold in its entirety spatially, but that are not works objectivized in a dynamic time duration. This dynamic nature of audiovisual significant is embodied in the concept of television programming in time on a channel and also in the concept of series in the realization of works, unlike the unique works of cinema and theatre. Human pupil is philogenetically programmed to direct itself instinctively towards movement’s perception. Television situation of reception at a noisy home and with priority audience monitoring attention does not facilitate the watching of audiovisual 5 We primarily refer to television audiovisual language; there is an audiovisual art that experiments with abstract visuality. 6 We will not develop here the differences between audiovisual iconic signs and indicial, because our interest lies in the difference between the audiovisual language and the reading-writing language. works non-dynamic in their images; they generate poor instinctive attraction, and this lack of attraction is emotionally interpreted as boredom7. Because of this dynamic-temporal intrinsic characteristic, coupled with dramatic realization, audiovisual language is very suitable for storytelling. Some theorists distinguish between displaying a unique and static image and narrating, which would a characteristic of the image in sequence (Aumont, 260). In narrative stories appear singular characters who act searching for an object valued as worthy of their effort; in a story, a dramatic action occurs, deployed in time in the pursuit of a purpose, with adversaries and adversity to overcome with energy towards a positive or tragic outcome. Cinema affinity with storytelling was highlighted already in 1916 by Hugo Munsterberg, the first prominent theorist of the new audiovisual phenomenon, who gave prominence to stories narration above theatrical works filming (called Photoplay at that time) and over didactic-scholar uses; filming theatrical works was the aesthetic and social “duty” that was wanted to impose on cinema at the 20th century beginning (Munsterberg, 1970). Difference between spatial sign and dynamic-temporal signs also affects news delivery that is displayed in space or in time. Press spatial signs on paper have found in journalistic inverted pyramid layout the more suitable technique, where in the initial space and through the triple resource of epigraph, heading, and deck, they can deliver a synthesis of the most important in news, leaving the body of the article for who is interested in reading for more information. Dynamic signs, on the contrary, are perceived in a temporal narration, which since Aristotle is known the convenience to present a sequence whose outcome occurs at the end; keeping thus the interest of audience through time - exactly the contrary of the journalistic narrative. The different layout of musical rankings in graphic space and in audiovisual time can also be appreciated; in radio and TV, these rankings are arranged in ascending order up the best (5-4-3-2-1), while in graphic space they are headed by the first and in descending order (1-2-3-4-5). However, temporality of cinema and TV is different for receiver’s psychological perception. Viewers demand from TV (especially broadcast TV) current information, i.e., the appearance of everyday events in present tense; broadcast TV also is associated by viewers with live company and current news. Cinema – through 7 Slow images demand a more attentive process in receiver´s de-codification, which is easier to achieve at the cinema room because of reception conditions already explained. storytelling - generates on receiver medial expectations concerning the fictional temporality: the "in illo tempore" of narrative, this is, the story that happened. 3.3. Informational richness Iconic image, even the static image of a photograph, carries a large amount of concrete and singular signs; it has, therefore, an enormous potential richness of information/communication. If abstract verbal language sign “woman” is compared with the visual sign consisting of an “iconic image of a woman”, is easy to understand that the first is a sign that abstracts all particularity to stay with a general and universal concept. On the contrary, a woman concrete visual image is full of peculiarities which give us much approximate information about hair and eye color, shape of the face, stature, age, race, clothes, social class, etc. 3.4. Affective potential This informational richness of the particular iconic image gives these signs a powerful emotional dimension; indeed, they can provoke (much more easily than abstract signs) feelings and emotions, memories and associations. Concrete visual image favors human communication through gestural and non-verbal signs (the most important of which is human face) which have more emotional than analytical impact; visual concrete and gestural communication implies rather a personification and a facial corporalization than a conceptual verbalization. Sympathy or antipathy, attraction or repulsion, arise more easily from visual faces and bodies than from words; visual beauty or ugliness generate emotions of pleasure or displeasure, that is why telegenie is so important on TV; but telegenie is not facialcorporal beauty, as commonly and often understood. It is rather the ability to communicate properly through non-verbal visuality, which express aspects that we do not perceive in face to face communication; facial telegenie is not an arbitrary imposition of filmmakers but a privileged way of expression and perception, since human beings are genetically equipped to detect emotions first of all in face, and also the beauty (or, on the contrary, facial ugliness), which causes genetic-cultural attraction (or displeasure). A personal and corporalized communication requires casting; this is searching for the appropriate emphatic faces to the required communication, and telegenic tests to detect facial-gestural communication performance in TV. Telegenie is usually associated with young beauty faces, but audiences are varied, and thus different animators having empathy with various groups are required, such as children and young people; in societies where the over 60s are a growing percentage of population, faces that identify and represent these sectors are required. The rather smallness of TV screens (compared to the huge screens of cinema) favors election of close-up images, which accentuates an intimate emotional relationship with faces. To make more emphatic messages emotionality, music adds strong emotional signals of different meaning: epic, romantic, anxiety and suspense, fear, and others. A visual color palette may be chosen by the audiovisual producer in scenery, costumes, warm and cool colors, use the chiaroscuro, and even on the black and white picture, etc.; the palette can be today stressed and altered with digital imaging. Visual color is another way to deliver affective meanings, as moods, to the audience. 3.5. Polysemy Informational richness in visual image is also the basis of the so-called polysemy. This informational wealth allows an active constructivism in subjective and social perception. According to Roland Barthes (1961; 1972) polysemy implies a floating chain of meanings, among which the reader has a certain freedom to constructively choose some and ignore others. The imprecision of meaning is highest in the visual image that is not accompanied with words; there are therefore few messages with images only; broadcasters need the linguistic code - written or oral - to clarify the receivers what they mean. In the same text, Barthes has exposed two central functions of the word in relation to the image: the role of anchorage to limit the dispersion of meanings, helping to denominate and orienting towards the desired connotations; and the function of relay that happens more in narrative messages, in which image and word are alternating to deliver information that makes progress action. In the case of moving images, relay verbal function acquires a special character, since active understanding of linguistic meaning is required in audiovisual spectator activity to build the perception of continuity in technical editing. It has been tested that physical viewer remoteness from images exhibited by a TV set (to the point of not hearing the linguistic code) disrupts the visual perception of a technically fluent editing and rather jumps are perceived between images planes. Continuity between the edition planes is a handicraft made by the editor of moving images, but subjective perception also requires the active participation of the viewers with their understanding of the linguistic meaning (Miller, 1994). But even when words limit the plurality of meanings and orient towards intentionally wanted interpretations, the image retains its basic polysemic richness and its dynamic tendency to dissociate from the constraints that the emitter tries to impose it through word anchorage and relay functions. Visual polysemy is the textual basis for the active ability of receivers in constructivist process face to television messages (Sánchez Vilela, 2000). It is also the basis for the fear to image and for the consequent iconoclastic tendencies, which periodically reappear in philosophies and religions that emphasize the authority of the word (Goethals, 1990) 8. 3.6. The code of spoken word Spoken word has not only anchoring and relaying functions to complement the visual image. It is also an autonomous code, i.e., a language with wider cultural implications, as it will be showed. In audiovisual language, word transit fugacity joins the fugacity of visual image; in addition, silent and isolated culture (enabled by the reading-writing code) has been massively invaded now by the incessant words spoken aloud from TV, to which radio and music playback must be added. The words massively uttered out loud summon audience that shares oral text; solitary and silent books reading constituted a metaphor for the sociological idea of mass with individuals fragmented and disjointed. In a culture with an enormous abundance of oral signs, written poetry tends to be displaced by musical song; phone calls and emails replace the art of writing letters; audiovisual fiction competes strongly with written narrative; TV and radio news compete with newspapers; we go less to rooms specially prepared to read in a quiet and concentrated manner, to watch movies, and theater plays, Audiovisual reception is rather daily at home and becomes familiar in everyday life, commented, noisy, interrupted and discontinued with variable attention. Audiovisual language has reintroduced in massive way, then, the verbal word, issued orally and heard; word and image, as strong and independent codes, not only complement but they also come in tension and contradiction; there are hearing mora than iconic audiovisual genres and vice versa; there are aesthetic schools that privilege the greater presence of one or other code; and there are academic disputes about the pre-eminence of visuality or orality in audiovisual media: while some highlight on TV the image priority to the point of estimating that there would be a human transformation towards the "homo videns" (Sartori, 1998), others 8 In Afghanistan, during the political control of the Taliban fundamentalist theologians, television and cinema were banned for fear of idolatry to images exhibiting living beings. relate TV with radio (Tarroni, 1979); some estimate that we are facing to a new oral culture rather than to a visual one, with features that we will point out more later. The visual relationship with objectivized writing in linear abstract signs allows a reader a more analytic understanding of text than an emotional connection with the author. This way, writing has enabled analytical commentary, the newspaper editorial genre, and the broader literary essay, very important genres for interpretation of events. Because of their specific abstract and analytical nature these genres are badly tolerated on television screen and when shown on screen, television’s concrete visuality tends to impose more emotional than rational assessments 9. Spoken word on TV personalizes in a visually present actor and thus establishes a more emotional relationship with the receiver than in written word. In television information genres, this most affective personal relationship is designated best with the word reliability (that should be felt by receiver) than with word credibility; this one adjusts better to the reader more cognitive relationship with abstract and impersonal word in written press. Some authors that accentuate visuality of TV (Debray, 1991) do not take into account that this media works with a multiplicity of genres that assume various features according to the relationship with the audience at home; there is, indeed, at least three categories of TV genres where oral word acquires an outstanding preeminence. Certain genres — as some company magazines - have a more oral character to adapt to the reception conditions of hearing audience at home; audience at home some times in the day can only give visual monitoring casual attention rather than a concentrated attention to TV Other genres work orality as a way of expressing emotion, as it is the case with soccer narrative and other sports; indeed, in sports competition genre, many viewers are not satisfied with the spectacle visuality patent and demand an oral narrator whose basic function is not narrate the obvious visually but affective contact, modulate, and orally amplify the emotions of the spectacle. It has been found in reception studies that Latin American fans of these sport genres enjoy greater satisfaction when narrator is more orally-emotional that visually referential; some former European school of television sport storytelling tried a laconic orality in favor of preeminence of visuality. However, Latin American sport viewers appreciate verb- 9 To present analytical comments, broadcast TV must produce more dramatic genres, as interviews and debate of personal opinions between opposing actors; documentary and the great audiovisual report, allow approaching to interpretative essay. emotional story to be complemented/contrasted by the oral commentary of a cold and rational analyst, who interprets emotionally told events. In various television genres - news, reports, magazines, shows - there is one or two persons acting as presenter, narrator, or conductor, with an important role to contact (in the technical sense, based on Jakobson’s functions, 1968) program with audience; here oral word appears strongly linked to the non-verbal telegenie and affective empathy of the conductor. Such a function of personalized contact in the conductor/presenter is nowadays decisive for the success in some genres and it appears typical of broadcast TV, since it does not occurs but rarely in cinema and theater10. Imitating uncritically the aesthetic of theatre, cinema, and documentary, some stories for broadcast TV try to skip this conductor/presenter contact (face-toface or in off) to rest solely on actual protagonists; these programs often have difficulty to insert themselves into broadcast TV precisely - because lack of contact function - narration becomes slower, it lengthens, it is more complex to follow, sometimes with very bad sound and poor elocution of protagonists in the screen; relationship with audience is different if videos are to be exhibited in a room for especially motivated audiences. Television sitcom genre markedly uses wit and sparkle in verbal dialog, unlike cinema where often visual gag predominates. Facing the undeniable fact of some televisual genres with a more hearing-oral character than visual, aesthetics with strong normative visual bias appear as rather bookish speculations, transferred uncritically from some cinema schooling, because they ignore the reception conditions of broadcast TV at home. Broadcast TV is a complex audiovisual-emotional media capable of displaying genres with very different characteristics (TV polidiscursivity); we must therefore make progress in formulate a television aesthetic, autonomous of reading-written works, cinema, and theatre. 3.7. Musicalization Music guides towards the proper emotional tone that must surround an audiovisual image; music emotionally accentuates the proper mood in scenes of humor, romance, suspense, disgust, anxiety, happiness or sadness; even, in some film 10 In the seventh chapter of the book “La TV Pública en América Latina. Reforma o Privatización” (Public TV in Latin America. Reform or privatization) was shown the oral origin of Latin American telenovela and the traces of orality that mark her; it is another TV genre with strong marks of orality - and therefore aesthetically independent of cinema and written literature (Fuenzalida, 2000). . productions, soundtrack is more important than the quality of visual-verbal narration. In many audiovisual narrations, sound and noises are not natural but used in an expressionist mode (Rodríguez Bravo, 1998). Andrés Wood in his film Violeta se fue a los cielos (2011) used constantly the sound of the wood floor crunch in a house to provoke associations with existential aspects in the life of Violeta Parra. But the musical-sound code, by acting at a human emotional level, provokes associations and identifications that emitters have little possibility to limit or circumscribe. Polysemy of visual image is reinforced, then, with the evocative music and sound code11. 3.8. Polidiscursivity in genres Programs elaborated with the signs of television language are presented to TV viewers specifically in a temporal sequence, which is called programming. The temporal sequence of programming goes in two directions: the vertical flow to cover 24 hours a day, and the horizontal flow to cover a week, a month, a seasonal and annual time. Programming is organized to exhibit very diverse programs and genres: information presents different genres such as news, reportages, documentaries, debates, magazines, docurreality. Narrative is offered through films, telenovelas, series, sitcoms, docudramas and others. Spectacles have programs as diverse as sporting events, musical shows, miscellaneous shows, spaces for humor, and others. Advertising and promotion is a genre that rarely is below 10%-15% in total programming. Proportion of genres varies from one channel to another, according to its audience preferences and editorial guidelines; broadcast TV is programed in a more generalist way and pay TV often offers a thematically segmented programming (sports, news, music, series, films, children's, etc.); genres change from one decade to another according to innovation and aging. Faced to this programmatic polidiscursivity, viewers perform a diachronic process of learning and tipologization of genres. This process of recognition leads the viewer to a diversified relationship, with different “reading covenants”, according to genres 11 All these semiotic characteristics of audiovisual language (concrete, dynamic, musicalized, affective) explain that it is more usual to adapt a dramatic or fictional written work for audiovisual than put in writing a fictional or dramatic audiovisual work; the latter occurs, instead, with certain large reports or audiovisual documentaries where the referential informative character has a great value; so it happened with the first television interview that Fidel Castro gave to the journalist Gianni Miná from RAI on June 28, 1987, which was specially released in the book "Un encuentro con Fidel” (An encounter with Fidel - Office for publications of the Council of State. La Habana. 1988). In Argentina happened the extremely rare case of a successful telenovela which was published as a book; the book was not very successful but the semiotic discussion about the transcription from an audiovisual work to text reading-writing text was notable (Soto, 1996). offered. Antiquity or novelty of TV channels in a society influences this learning, the attraction of the genres, or its saturation and fatigue. But genres have a pre-TV cultural history; TV producers have not manufactured in vitro the current genres: they have taken them the from the cultural heritage and the non-TV popular preferences (as has been proven in various studies - Martín Barbero, 1987); authors and producers have re-worked and hybridized them for the new television media. The massive attraction of many television genres is based on their continuity with popular cultural memory, as it is the case with Latin-American telenovela that has a long pre TV history in radio novela and photonovela. Due to this TV polidiscursivity, viewers are not engaged in a homogeneous and univocal relationship, but in a diversified one, based on their own cultural memory, expectations, and differentiated preferences. This polidiscursivity in programming notes that we should not speak of a unique relationship with TV, but about multiple relationships and expectations of audiences with TV. 3.9. Associative and constructivist perception Viewer’s perception of television language shows some emphasis in relation to perception of a written work: the viewer must associate pictures, words, music, sounds. He constructs a synthesis by bringing together polysemic visual images with information articulated in words and music, a basically emotional code. It is a perception that involves several senses, and it can be called synesthetic. But, in addition, viewers associate very diverse genres. Programing is going in a contiguous sequence: advertising interspersed with fictional narrative, products’ commercials associated with deep motivations, information of nearby and distant worlds, news of historical events woven with the fictional fantasy. Because of this TV programming daily and continually offered to the audience, in the 1970s appeared an interpretation (prepared by academic speculation without reception studies) called " flow theory"; According to it, audience of this television flow would receive different genres without competences to distinguish them (confusing news with fiction and advertising), without distinguishing informational facts of fictional stories, and confusing real people with television characters. Subsequent reception studies by television audiences do not confirmed these speculations, but certainly confirmed perception in association and synthesis built by audiences based on their cultural background12. 12 Flow theory is prior to reception studies by audiences; It is also previous to studies about television genres and the different “reading covenants” that audiences establish with them; flow Television narrative permanently uses ellipsis, i.e. the omission of elements of real continuity, introducing narrative leaps in space and in time - which forces the viewer to actively associate to reconstruct the sequence and maintain narrative constancy. The associative mode of audiovisual perception is very different from the analytical mode set by word, especially the written word. The word analyzes the referential world, abstracts and generalizes, de-concretizes, and takes distance, it operates with a logic of linear sequence, associates in the diachronic length of the discourse; audiovisual language associates synchronously between several codes and favors the synthesis of redundant information. Communicative and informational richness of iconic dynamic image prevents, therefore, that receiver can exhaust all fullness of meaning in these audiovisual messages. For this reason, then, a subliminal perception condition is inherent to the dynamic visual image. We decodifie in a conscious and rational manner only some elements of the meanings proposed by these messages; another very important part is perceived affective or subliminally, or is not perceived; some meanings are not consciously perceived in a first viewing, but can be in a second or third exposure to the message; however, in the first viewing they have been seen subliminally without reaching the conscious perception. Such polysemic richness in meanings is what allows viewers and moviegoers to gratify exchanging their different perceptions about a work, and perceive the meanings constructed by others; and also to perceive in a second or third exposure meanings not previously captured. People capture sensorially audiovisual signs offered by screens of film and TV, but perception occurs when they associate them constructively with their cultural memory, desires and emotions, fantasies and expectations, prejudices and rejections, and so perception is finally a personal interpretation, with situationalcultural ingredients, about the displayed message. Varela estimated that human perception is built in around 75% with internal cultural contributions of the subject, and only in 25% with external data (Varela 2005; Varela et al. 2001); cognitive psychology does not endorse the conception of a receiver subject, culturally empty, passive, and confused by emissions. speculation ignored that audiences build their own cultural interpretation not only in relation to broadcasting but based on their cultural capital, schooling, family and groups relations, and with other media. The audience could see Helen Mirren portraying Queen Elizabeth I of England, but had enormous social and group information to distinguish clearly the actress from the historical Queen of the past, and the reigning monarch in the 20th century; audience might gratify discussing the quality of Mirren interpretation by comparing it with other actresses, such as Cate Blanchett. Reception with real audiences’ studies dismissed academic speculations about the confusion of audiences by programming flow. Coupled with polysemy of signs, the constructivist perception allows the discrepancy in the meanings of audiovisual messages; while some will read a funny comedy in a program, others will see values or political threat. 3.10. Reintroduction of ludic-festive popular culture It is precisely audiovisual 20th century which has characterized the Homo Ludens (Huizinga, 1990; Combs, 2000) and festivity in popular culture (Bajtin, 1987; Paz, 1985). According to Huizinga, the ludic feature crosses a very wide set of cultural activities, such as Children's play, and recreation and relaxation activities Competition (agon): skill and strength sports, forensic contest skills, competence in academic, business, political, military, economic areas (simulation games) Gaming: calculations, contests (thrill of vertigo) Liturgical-cultural representation Theatrical representation (play – spiel - jouer) Public holiday: exhibition Dance - music (play - spiel - jouer music) Poetry - figurative language - fictional metaphor Eros According to Huizinga, ludic activity includes two basic elements: the struggle for something and/or the representation of something. Competition and gambling games are illustrative of the pursuit of a goal and a prize. Theatrical and musical performance, in English, German, and French langues retained their original playful conception with the words play, spiel, and jouer. For Huizinga, ludic activity has certain characteristics: is a free but absorbent activity, not related with the obligations imposed by everyday life; in this sense it belongs to a sphere of its own, rather disinterested because it has no immediate practical utility for everyday life. Ludic activity generates a special space-time, with an immanent order different from the everyday life and exhausts in itself, with different rules for each game, free but mandatory. Those involved have a sense of joy and tension towards an uncertain resolution. Ludic activity firstly refers to primary oral stages of Western cultures, where activities were less distinct: theatre was integrated with cultural representation, religious feast with epic legends and competences of sport skills, and with dance and music; public feast was popular and trans class; Dionysian, i.e., simultaneously sacred and erotic. This festive-ludic representation originates one of the Western conceptualizations about entertainment: positive appreciation not only as rest and physic energy recovery but also as a universe simultaneously of representation-regeneration, ludicimaginary but related to the socio-cultural life, but independent of the constraints of everyday life; i.e., a representation-fantasy show, useful because it is able to renew and widen the understanding of oneself and of reality (cf. Communication Research Trends 3/1998; Bajtin, 1987). In West, the processes of cultural differentiation have been marked by the analytical imprint of literacy. Writing made Greek drama autonomous of its oral-cultural origin; the rationalist secularization will constitute autonomous domains for other arts such as dance and music, and sport. Christianity – centered in Logos - separates the liturgical-cultural feast from the agrarian and human reproduction, removes the erotic from the feast, secularizes dance and theater, introduces seriousness distrusting laughter, but allowing it in the popular field. The illiterate peasantry of the European Middle Age (as opposed to the official culture of chivalry and the Court) continued enacting a popular feast with strong preChristian resonance in its more undifferentiated stage between the sacred and the profane. Popular culture continued the “carnivalesque” feast of the Greco-Roman era, which broke in its festive space the strong differences, hierarchies, and daily order, allowing irreverent satire towards truths, mockery towards civil or religious authority, anti-ascetic excess, and then flowered in the urban carnivals in Florence, Rome, Venice, Cologne, Paris, and England. According to Bajtin, Middle Age was a dual but embedded world among official seriousness and comic grotesque humor even within the Church and the Court. However, festive culture in its negation and reversal of the cultural order had a utopian sense of regeneration, of return to the golden age and hopeful of a future without hierarchies and current privations. European aristocratic culture was transmitted from inside of family along with hereditary rank; its scope encompassed Court customs, weapons, and politics; the theme of Fortune, on the other hand, was extremely popular as opposition to the material well-being and the hereditary aristocratic status. and denial of social immobility13. 13 The theme of Fortune (Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi) opens and closes Carmina Burana by Carl Orff, music work based on medieval poems, where clearly appear irreverent and non-conformist elements of European popular culture associated with important groups like the goliards (as in these poems) movement of young students that remained between centuries X - XIII in Germany, But massification of printing in the 17th European century drove the differentiation of Enlightenment literate culture away from popular culture and falling out with her. Popular culture had manifested itself in spaces like the plaza, fair, circuses, inns, taverns; it continued to be expressed through music and dance, chants and erotic poems, oral stories, games and competitions, gaming, costumes, masks, popular theatre, illusionists, excesses on food and drink, parties. The emergent European bourgeoisie –rather masculine- constituted their own cultural space in salons, cafes, clubs, political assemblies, books and newspapers. The literate, rational and scientific culture was expressed there by analytical-conceptually discussions about science, religion, and political organization. This bourgeois public space was born as a culture that was self-acquired, as opposed to the inherited aristocratic culture; but it was also born in opposition to popular culture that began to be considered short of seriousness, excessive, vulgar, hedonistic, irrational, uneducated, and unscientific, without aesthetics. Protestant Reformation had suppressed carnival in countries where it dominated; the Calvinist Puritanism fought with energy the popular feast, closing the Elizabethan theatres in London and banning public dancing in England and New England, and stimulating the bourgeoisie to devote with austere seriousness to businesses (ascesis intramundana). Reform and Enlightenment rationalism emphasized the negative Western conception of entertainment: as a fantasist world of useless distraction, alienating of seriousness about definitive truths and important chores in life. Bourgeois classical culture was conceived, then, not only different from the popular culture but higher, thus charged of the historical mission of instruct, oversee and discipline the inferiors (Docker, 1987)14. Bourgeois culture replaced the word "popular" by the word "vulgar" (from “vulgus” as different to cultivate) to disqualify the works different to their illustrated preferences. An audiovisual language as television which reintroduces orality tends (by their concrete visual-gestural signs) to produce programs with contents more consonant with audience preferences to ludic-festive show and fiction storytelling. Virtually all television genres redefine ludic activities: competencies and contests of all kinds, France and England. These same cultural elements passed to the urban European Carnival, and have continued in the Carnival of Rio de Janeiro; Bay of San Salvador, and the Mardi Gras in New Orleans. 14 A Chilean publication has researched the expansion of Enlightenment seriousness, and suppression of spontaneity, laughter, Carnival, games, music, dances and chants in 19th century Chile; spontaneity and laughter were not consonant with the new illustrated European ideals, in force after independence (1810-1820); the intention was to impose a serious, sullen, and stiff Chilean model, and thus access to a European image, hopefully British; ludic-festive demonstrations were typical of uneducated (vulgar) people (Salinas et al., 2002). dramatic confrontations in sports, politics or judicial ones, performances and exhibitions (shows); dance, music, and disguise integrated into the show; erotization in most of television genres (the body presented through indicial signs hardly can be de-erotized, as opposed to the abstract reading-writing sign); the imaginary ludic in audiovisual fiction; television advertising is probably the genre which has led the new presence of ludic category to the higher level (we speak ludic-imaginarily of products and services existing outside the text). The massive character of audiovisual media and the fact that it is welcomed inside the home in a resting situation tends to recover popular culture with its ludic, Dionysian and festive-regenerator elements. Certainly transformed by their daily use, privatization and electronic virtuality; but it is not less true that intrinsic language elements push broadcast and massive TV towards a virtual upgrade of the old festive market-square. In a particular area of audiovisual sector, production of children's programs has substantially recovered the ludic culture of reading-writing and oral tales; a fictional narrative with animal and toy characters that represent humans and audiences appears on them. In current studies about development of baby's brain appears the emergency genetically programmed towards ludic competences, and this provides a neurobiological foundation to the revaluation of the ludic capacity; this competence is now value as required for the construction of the self, for motivation towards cognitive exploration of the world in making and experimentation, and a creative basis for art and fiction. This new information drives a recent trend in production of children's TV that seeks the representation of children's affection, specifying their feelings and emotions, presenting symbolic fictions where children can recognize their positive aspects and lacks, displaying customized processes of change and achievement from errors and oversights; i.e., working less on learning school cognitive material and rather in exploration of their own emotions, analysis of their behaviors through ludic identification with characters, trying to strengthen their self-esteem and self-confidence in their internal capacities for growth and achievement (Fuenzalida, 2012; Communication Research Trends, 2012). 3.11. Cultural hybridization In addition to polidiscursivity offered to audience from on-screen programming, the increasingly globalized television (by satellite channels and Internet) to the entire planet, makes appear a multiculturalism that socializes towards an hybridization and a cultural miscegenation; a new situation in which will be harder to define national culture as a process uncontaminated of other influences. The preservationism, isolationism and cultural apartheid, as well as the search for differentiating national expressions, crashes with the shocking reality of the hybridism and cultural deterritorialization -as notes the anthropologist García Canclini (1990). The more pessimistic hypothesis estimates that global TV and Internet would be the current melting pot that would boost towards a hybrid culture. More optimistic positions estimate that global exchange would boost towards multiculturalism and tolerance for diversity. This new hybrid culture is the current habitat where children socialize, in which appear everyday life of other countries, with their behaviors and attitudes. In the American fictional narrative appear, for example, divorce and a greater sexual permissiveness -not so much as models that would be deliberately proposed by evil imperialist producers, but as a tendency of behaviors in these different cultures. One of the clearest manifestations of this hybridization appears in several Japanese cartoon where spatial fantastic characters with magical powers are mixed with mythological characters from the past, with Japanese cultural traditions, and epic battles taken from Western narratives. But the complexity of this television influence towards a hybridization appears in the fact that it co-exists with a contrary trend, i.e., localism; driven sometimes by television itself, which manifests in nationalist movements, in the assessment of regional cultures, in the search and development of distinctive products with local identity (regional meals, products with designation of origin, handicrafts, folk music, colors, deliberately distinctive industrial design, “country image”, etc.). This tension forked towards global and local can be found in global television industry; programs that are successful with audience in a country are sold as format for their adaptive localization to other audiences. TV Global presence through international channels on cable complementarily leads the audience to require from national stations a number of programs where local cultural reality appears. Obitel (www.obitel.cl) studies on emission and consumption of television fiction show that Latin American audience in broadcast TV prefer national and Latin American TV fictions rather than American fiction; a TV consume very contradictory with the preference for American film fiction exhibited in cinemas (Fuenzalida - July, 2011; 2012). Thus the presence of global and local cultural elements can no longer be conceptualized in terms of hegemony and exclusion but rather as a new cultural space where these elements are integrated in surprising consume ways by audience. The concept of cultural hybridization, emerged from cultural reception studies, has displaced, then, the concept of cultural imperialism, created a few decades ago, because it appears more appropriate to understand the interactions between TV audience and other cultures15. Hybridization does not imply domination over a culture passively colonized, but critical repeal, active appropriation, interpretative readings raised by the textual polysemy, re-meaning towards new semantization, valuation of local productions in certain realizations and of foreign fiction in others, etc. Studies on the interpretation of the same television program by different cultural communities find much more re-meaning on the basis of their own culture than cultural domination (Adler and La Pastina, 1994; Mayer, 2003). 3.12. Different semiotic-cultural efficiency of the new language Reading-writing language is analytical, differentiating, abstract, it rationalizes, it is linear; it has required developing a formal logic to ensure their reasoning; it constitutes the semiotic basis of philosophy and science for 2,500 years in the history of the West. While verbal language objectifies in books and is institutionalized at school and university, television language objectifies more appropriately in narrative fiction and ludic spectacle. As a polysemic and glamorous language it affects more fantasy and affection than human rationality; it is governed more by dramatic rhetoric than by formal logic. We have needed to create the “ludic-affective” expression to account for these differential peculiarities of audiovisual language. Reading-writing language is the foundation of West rational culture interested in scientific research and in development of political, philosophical and theological theories; television language, by contrast, is more useful to storytelling, shows, and ludic entertainment. Memory of written texts is therefore more precise and better differentiated (articulated, in the sense of its Latin Etymology: differential unit) than memory of audiovisual messages; in this case, as it has often been noted, memory is more affective, diffuse, and global16. It has also been verified that understanding of television news information - the more rational area of TV - is governed more by rules of the dramatic narrative than by conceptual logic (Lewis, 1986; López, 2001). Those who try to impose television information the rules of written press, trying to inform better, end up misleading the audience. 15 The need for local recognition is driving towards processes of "nationalization" of some programs in successful genres, such as contests and telenovelas. Instead, therefore, of an international circulation of the same program – with a homogeneous drive, as feared by the thesis of cultural imperialism - today has emerged an important market of programs formats, where know-how is sold, which allows to locate programs. 16 Ludic-affective language raises the requirement of research techniques that successfully realize the audience affective motivations, that are more opaque to own rationality; such opacity explains the contradiction, so often detected, between what the audience declares that they “should” (rationally) watch on TV and the different effective conduct of viewing, which rather depends on emotional motivations, less transparent to their own conscience. This opacity has reintroduced qualitative techniques for researching television meaning for users. This difference in languages causes a huge culture shock, not only about different works but misunderstandings and resentments, and improper demands. Rationalconceptual culture requires a TV that spreads the west high culture and school, philosophy and science; but visual and musical codes of television language internally tend to fiction, fantasy, and ludism. Ordered architecture of school curriculum appears as the antithesis of the fragmented diversity in television programming, and these differences are result of different languages. Many assignments of purposes which should be complied by TV or a program are not viable because their authors consider television language as a neutral externality that would not affect the object reference; i.e. the audiovisual would be something like a glass container that may contain wine, oil, a perfume or a corrosive acid, or a wrapper of paper used indifferently to various objects17. On the contrary, several analysts, including Neil Postman (1985), considered TV ludic-affective language intrinsically perverse because it would have an internal degradation trend for human rationality, and of which only social ills could be obtained (cf. Jensen, 1991; see also the debate between Neil Postman and Camille Paglia on these two languages and their cultural implications in Crowley & Heyer, 1997). The cultural shock caused by electronic media has generated recent studies which estimate that the new audiovisual language would have a macro-social impact analogous to the Cultural Revolution introduced by writing in Greece, culminating in centuries V and IV. B. C. (Havelock, 1982; 1986; Olson, 1988; Crowley & Heyer, 1997); but while writing marked the transition from an oral culture to a literary culture, the mass advent of audiovisual language will reintroduce a “second orality” or also a “secondary orality” in massively literate Western audiences (Ong, 1982). Indeed, thought and expression characteristics in a primary oral culture, i.e. without literacy and writing presence, according to Ong (Ong, op. cit. chapter III), are very similar to those that previously mentioned as specificities in audiovisual language: Expository (énonciatif) rather than analytical 17 Facing this different audiovisual language, reading-writing intellectuals have generally adopted two antithetical positions; some are seeking to understand the new language rules and striving to translate into new genres and forms their concerns; some playwrights and novelists have explored the narrative of audiovisual series and telenovela. But a declining sector, however important, cannot understand the cultural mutation introduced by the audiovisual language, i.e., the autonomy and specificity of TV in relation to the literary domain. cumulative and additive rather than logically subordinate18 repetitive rather than innovator in subjects redundant rhetoric rather than austere close to existential and situational world rather than abstract adapts to the receiver19 more empathetic than with objectifying distance agonistic schemas rather than logic-conceptual expositions This allows understanding, as often noted in recent years, that massive attraction for TV in Latin America is linked to a strongly oral pre-Columbian cultural substrate, with weak imprint of literary culture (Morandé, 1984; Brunner, 1989). 18 Example of oral cumulative and additive style, repetitive and with dosed introduction of new elements: Psalm 127 (126) “Unless the Lord builds the house, their labor is in vain who build it. Unless the Lord watches over the city, in vain the watchman keeps his vigil” This figure of language is called rhythmic parallelism and is very common in spoken language culture; these oral forms facilitated memorization and cultural reproduction, culminating in their release in writing on the text of the Bible. 19 Examples of texts with a previous common oral tradition, and their subsequent scriptural-authorial adaptation according to the needs of audience: Matthew 13, 23 “But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown”. Luke 8,15 “But the seed on good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop”. Matthew 16, 24 “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me”. Luke 9, 23 “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me”. In Luke’s authorial personality appears a concern - of himself, or gathered of the previous oral tradition - for time and everyday perseverance of the community for whom he wrote his Gospel. In theatrical plays direction is preserved the very old practice of adapting a written text to a target audience and to an epoch; such a usual practice is a fingerprint of the old adaptive relationship in oral theatre and in oral storytelling to their audience. The review carried out by Latin American academics in the '80 decade about telenovela history also pointed out that this genre inherited the melodramatic and oral matrix that previously had been very successful in popular theatre, popular music (tango, bolero, corridos, vallenatos, and others), radio novela and photonovela (Martin Barbero 1987, 1992; Mazziotti 1996, 2006); Mexican and Argentinean melodramatic cinema lived glorious decades between 1930-1950. When broadcast TV appeared in Latin America, between 1950-1960, it was nurtured from that melodramatic-oral matrix and it inherited those audiences20; but Latin American filmmakers evolved towards learning (in specialized institutes) European forms (socialist realism, neo-realism, intellectualistic rationalism of reading-written matrix, cinema-verité, and other trends) for the production of theatrical movies. This different cultural tradition could explain the huge popularity of telenovela for TV audiences and the little assistance for Latin American theatrical movies. As previously stated, west interest and re-appreciation of human emotionality for the proper oneself understanding, for the environment, and for social relations, emerge at the current stage where audiovisual language intensified and massified the social presence of signs with emotional involvement for audiences. According to new conceptions, audiovisual language that highlight emotional relationship constitute a form of knowledge that allows perceiving aspects different to cognitive rationalApollonian perception, and also constitute a motivating principle for active behavior. Emotional motivation constitutes a basic formative power for the development of persons and their capacity for action in life. 3.13. Multimedia digital convergence We end again mentioning technological-industrial aspects; in current digital stage, not only audiovisual language acquires new social presence and relationships with audiences through broadcast TV digitalization (in Chile and most of South America with Nipo-Brazilian standard). Digitalization drives, furthermore, TV integration in multimedia convergence, causing ubiquity in emission/reception, and global interconnection. The complex new digital language involves the receiver as an active multimedia manipulator/operator, able to build virtual networks. Medial convergence has theoretical implications for the conception of social TV influence; in a multimedia environment it is no longer possible to conceive in a 20 According to Mayra Cue Sierra, the first Latin American telenovela was Senderos de Amor broadcasted by Cuban TV in 1952, and was written by radio novelist Mario Barral (Ponencia al Primer Festival y Mercado de la Telenovela en Ibero America. Punta del Este, Uruguay. 28 Marzo 2 Abril 2005). In Chile, is emblematic too the inauguration of telenovela industry with Arturo Moya Grau (former radio novelist) and his success with La Madrastra (Canal 13 - 1981). behaviorist way the relation audience-TV; i.e. in a one-linear mode by each isolated program with audience. Isolated and linear TV reception has been overtaken by current viewing in a multimedia environment and with audiences involved in multitasking. Chat and Internet social media connection allow a commented, criticized, mocking, actively shared reception. We are all living this semiotic communication stage whose sociocultural consequences are little predictable yet but much more speculative. 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