Audiovisual Language: Ludic-Affective & Dramatic Character

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.

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
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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. While some
predict the end of printed reading-writing and of audiovisual cinematographictelevision emissions massively convening audiences, others suggest that historically
media and languages do not disappear but are integrated into innovative synthesis;
in fact, they have appeared in every era private and restricted communication forms
coexisting with different forms of public-massive information, and local stories with
collective fictional stories. The digital stage would imply for audiovisual sector and
their audiences not disappearance but new forms of expression/reception and most
important new oneself and social perceptions.
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