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You are young and you have a TV network in your own hands. You also have all the equipment you need – professional cameras and editing equipment, and a production staff. Plus, there is no commercial pressure: everything you produce will be broadcasted, reaching most of the country's TVs. This is the perfect scenario for innovation, right? Wrong.
A quick look at university channels in the Brazilian television can prove you wrong. Despite being produced by young people, usually media students, most of those channels just end up recycling traditional TV formats. All the news shows are based on people sitting behind desks, narrating the news of the day, many times dressed up in suits. Talk-shows and 'variety' shows are mostly absolutely similar to the old conventional TV language models. In short, there is no innovation in terms of language, just the same old thing. This situation is at the same time a challenge, and an opportunity. The race is on to reinvent the old TV language, especially because of the emergence of online video and other new media. Whoever innovates in terms of new and smart TV language, will probably capture new markets, even if temporarily.
So, the race has begun out there. A quick search on YouTube demonstrates that there are already people in search of new visual languages. The best example is still probably the lonelygirl15 case. It is funny to see how controversial this experiment turned out to be. An article on the Wall Street Journal, for instance, accused the project of going too far, violating ethical limits. Other publications, such as Wired magazine, celebrated the case as the first new media's "soap opera." As a matter of fact, the episodes were watched by millions of people. Apparently the purpose of the project was clear from the beginning: to explore the limits of YouTube as a media, creating the "ultimate reality show".
But YouTube is far from being the only medium to be reinvented. All new media and communication tools are, at the end, in search of new languages. What could be possibilities of Skype for experimenting with new languages? What about instant messengers? Or mobile phones? Or, yet, what are the linguistic limits of webcams? All are out there, widespread, and open to be reinvented in terms of their possible usages.
Two examples can help showing some possibilities. The first comes from a story told by John Perry Barlow, former Grateful Dead lyricist and one of the key contemporary digital thinkers. Barlow enthusiastically told us a few years ago about a conversation he had, from his apartment in New York, with the Japanese entrepreneur Joi Ito, who was then located in Tokyo. When the talk was over, both decided to keep the Skype communication channel open. For a long time, an audio window between the apartments in Tokyo and New York was kept wide open. It was possible to hear steps, dishes being washed and random conversation happening in each place. This 'non-utilitarian' use of Skype, beyond the mere 'phone call' framework, can tell much about the still unexplored possibilities for reinventing the language of digital tools.
The second example has to do with webcams. Formerly used for two people (or a few people) to see each other during interpersonal communication, they are now starting to become a social communication tool. Websites such as Stickam, Justin TV, and others, feature a significant amount of people broadcasting their own image for the whole web to see – live and sometimes on a 24-7 basis. However, once again, the format is often the same: a still camera filming its owner while he or she sits in front of the computer. In spite of the thousands of online webcam broadcasters, even the image frame seems to follow the same pattern: the camera is placed on top of the monitor, and it doesn't get much more creative than that. Experimenting with other possibilities for the language of webcams is something still to be done.
Accordingly, media schools everywhere take it seriously, and consider offering 'experimentation' as a course, in order to go beyond either the established telejournalism model, or the mere habits of people online, stimulating the creation of new languages connected to new media. And that is not as simple as embracing the tiresome 'traditional' forms of experimentation, such as trembling hand-held cameras, and quickly edited scenes made popular by MTV videos and by Danish film makers in the past ten to fifteen years. This could be the chance for Brazil to prove its cannibalistic talent of incorporating influences from everywhere, swallowing the new media tools and reinventing their language in still unimagined ways.
tags: rio-de-janeiro brazil media-events brazil cinema-video tv-on-the-web television media language communications webcam john-perry-barlow university innovation media-studies local-context-global-commons youtube stickam lonelygirl15
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