JLF - Mediatizations and Interstitial
JLF - Mediatizations and Interstitial
JLF - Mediatizations and Interstitial
DOI 10.1515/9781501503825-009
Even though the most common definition of semiotics is, the one from Sau-
ssure, “the life of signs as part of social life”,1 in our discipline there has been a
revolution between the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s and that has
not received enough attention. Even when it is true that Pécheux (1978) and Verón
(1987b) posited strong founding gestures of this new perspective, it is also true
that this revolution has mainly occurred in a progressive manner and without
great manifestos.
Perhaps it all started for us with Barthes’ concern (1962, 1970a, 1970b) about
photography and advertising rhetoric; or Metz’s discussion about the relevance
of the concept language for the film, (1964, 1970). Obviously, Eco made a great
contribution, giving space to “mass culture” among the semiotic phenomena
and, on the other hand, instituting the first approaches to the study of “live tele-
vision” (1985[1965]). Since then, there has been an explosion of semiotics into the
mediatizations.
There is no doubt that Christian Metz (1972) produced one of the major steps
for the study of mediatizations. His effort to adapt a Saussurean concept of lan-
guage as a formal system to the study of the film language was revolutionary. He
highlighted the impossibility of finding in the world of the image and films the
linguistic double articulation. Moreover he noticed the absence of strong codes in
films in contrast to those putatively attributed to verbal language.
Once the Saussurean model was questioned by Metz, the French researcher
began to search the social conventions of film language that make society under-
stand it. He worked in two different levels: firstly, the internal conventions among
film editing, which are typical of motion pictures with sound; those modes of
discursive construction are not found in literature or in verbal communication.
Secondly, the film sense is supported by the presence of cultural conventions that
exceed every film: genres and styles organize the production and the comprehen-
sion in discursive social life2.
The presence of the film edition series and the genres and styles conventions
showed that there is a field of social assumption working as a set of discursive
conventions in society. That generated a theory about film because it works as
1 As is known, Saussure talks about semiology but that has been superseded by ‘semiotics’ as
a term.
2 Metz describes how a sequence, relevant in a humorous film, it is not at all relevant in a ro-
mantic comedy (Metz, 1974: 45–49).
several social discourse rules3. That approach showed a very important and inno-
vative path to study every mediatization.
From that background in the work of Barthes, Eco and Metz, the study of
mediatizations began finally with Eliseo Verón’s book (1987a) Construir el acon-
tecimiento. From that moment, the study of the mediatizations have constituted
a specific and different field in semiotics in general and in Argentine and Latin
American semiotics in particular. Verón’s assertion about the media as a builder
of social reality opened the field of media analysis in search of experiences and
transdiscursive social conventions. The marks on the discursive surface are
explored, through operations analysis, as traces of social conditions of sense pro-
duction (Verón, 1987b)4.
Of course, we cannot advance much more here in the description of a process
that we consider important to describe our work and for understanding the pro-
cesses of research innovation as we understand it.5 However, what is important,
as we have recently summarized (Fernández, 2014, 2015), is that we can sum up
the process of research and analysis of a phenomenon in the media in three dif-
ferent and partially sequential instances:
– Semiohistory, which describes the temporal trajectory that converges in the
phenomenon we are studying from at least three levels: technical devices and
their relationships with the social concerns that guide, consciously or not
consciously, their development. The specific discursive level, when genres
and styles are intersecting each other, more or less in conflict, in the particu-
lar studied time. Finally, the social actions and usages of those formations
that involve media and discourse.6 Each series has an independent life which
will be connecting with the others.
3 In reference to this field of social knowledge and patterns, to avoid the risk of metaphysics,
we prefer now to use the notion of presupposition, even in a field where not many colleagues are
wandering nowadays.
4 Verón wasn’t alone in Argentina. In two recent books that presented the results of extended
careers, researchers can see the strong contributions to this field of both Oscar Steimberg (2013)
and Oscar Traversa (2014).
5 A lot of Latin-American research would be included in that approach: work on rites (Finol
2001), poverty and its social representations (Pardo, 2007), government communication pro-
cesses (Fernández, Sznaider, 2012) or social mobilizations that cross public space by putting in
action also old and new mediatizations (Cid Jurado, 2013).
6 As is known, Verón (1997) has defined a medium according to two series: the technological
devices that constitute it and the uses the society applies to them. We now consider that these
are necessary because, as we will see later, it is necessary to consider them when we study new
mediatizations and social networks in which the discursive (and not only the discursive) are im-
Usually, we consider today that this scheme originates in the social life of the
mass media and the broadcasting system, in which it is possible to clearly distin-
guish, as it exists in reality, instances of production as well as recognition (Verón
1987b). The new mediatizations — especially the main social networks (or plat-
forms), like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. — question that differentiation for
two types of reasons. Firstly, they show interactions on their interfaces and, in
addition, not all operations are purely discursive: to like, favour, share, download
or upload, etc. are actions in the sense that other social sciences have defined,
such as ethnography and microsociology.
As we will see, from this point of view we can now discuss the broadcasting
approach, but bearing in mind that our goal is to understand the relationships
of innovation between semiotics and its objects in transformation. Social infor-
mation and the mainstream of the music industry were developed through the
presence, the support and the rules of the broadcasting multi-media system: that
is, the relationships between material and discursive production and recognition
media grammars. Different cultural phenomena such as globalization, actuality,
tango, pop culture, cinema and many others would be impossible to conceive
without the broadcasting media system. In spite all of that, the system’s aspects
are changing, causing transformations and crisis in their paths.
bricated (Fernandez, 2008). In fact, both were always embedded as we will see later, but now it
is inevitable to observe the phenomenon.
researchers not belonging to the field of semiotics (perhaps with the exception of
Scolari).
And now, those who have experienced or researched the life of the new medi-
atizations can say that they are in a third moment, a new stage of knowledge
about these objects that only a few years ago were just presenting themselves. It
is a time of resurgence and recognition, in the universe of the new mediatizations,
of the socio-cultural problems. This has been referred to in our work as postbro-
adcasting: the time when the coexistence between broadcasting and networking
is finally registered (Fernández, 2013). Coexistence means that the stress, compe-
tence, and battles for survival, etc. are played out in the conflictual relationships
between both systems.7
These last statements mean that through the networks and in their mediati-
zations many opportunities are appearing to apply prior knowledge about social
and discursive life. This is due to the fact that it is now accepted that the media
transformation processes also contain levels of accumulation of practices and
experiences (Fernández, 2007). There are three aspects that are representative of
this third moment:
a. while networks create an horizontal or peer to peer effect, still the vast major-
ity of participants are only publishing little pieces of info or looking at the
flow of postings, though it is true that the emitters are many more than in the
broadcasting world;
b. now we know that not every phenomenon on the web is a phenomenon of
networking; beyond Twitter microblogging, we have studied the Vorterix.com
platform, based in streaming, but establishing relationships between a radio
station, a theatre and a website offering multimedia discourses. The Vorterix
platform never proposes to their followers any of the kind of interaction upon
which Facebook or even Twitter is based (Fernández, 2014a);
c. in addition, researchers have discovered that amidst the widespread opti-
mism of the digital world, there is also obsolescence and failure, such as
Second Life, Google + or, finally, the failure of the great socio-political shift
announced by Castells (2012) after the Arab spring.
In the first two moments the social sciences in general and semiotics in particular
appeared in a defensive position before the socio-cultural development of the
media. Their reaction was conservative and distrustful regarding the new theo-
retical formulations that seemed to get ahead of phenomena. Now, in the third
7 Sandra Valdettaro (2008) has described newspapers’ strategies to compete with on-line infor-
mation. The main concept has been to design printed paper as a screen.
moment, the positions of the social theories are changing because they are again
studying the results and not announcing the future.
The main characteristic of this time is that we are not only facing the list of
what is new with some developed statutes, but in a position where we can build
new statutes from lists of results with data of the past and the present that, by
definition, already do not only look to the future even if we are still in the short
term. Thus, semiotics regains its place, in specific terms and in terms of its inter-
action – in some very new ways as we will see with other disciplines of social
theory, as a whole, it recovers its workspace behind the practices of society. For
example, nobody dares to proclaim the Utopian future of new media anymore
with reference to such developments as Google-glass. In the best case scenario,
its development is observed and optimism is left to the web search giant and its
pre-paid commentators.
It is important to understand and take advantage of this stage of experience;
work starts from here. In the world of music, this stage is referred to what we
call postbroadcasting and something that should be taken into account is that
the results that will be presented here, emerge from a tour of periodization of
the relationships between music and media that have been described in previ-
ous works (Fernández, 2014: 36–40). However, investigations about the media of
sound (radio, phonograph, telephone) have occupied a marginal space among
semiotic concerns. Nevertheless, as we said at the beginning of this chapter, the
advancement of knowledge not only puts us in a better position in respect of the
new phenomena but also allows us to deeply understand phenomena already
studied in the past.
8 Gutiérrez Reto, M. (2008) considers that the use of the image of the dog facing the voice of the
master phonograph horn as the RCA Victor logo was, among other things, a proposal for the
visual position in front of the transmitter of sound.
atization more than the cinematographic screen as Manovich (2005 [2001]) had
argued (Fernández, González-Azcárate, 2011).
From that point of view, the mediatizations of sound are a very particular
mediatization and perhaps that profound differentiation could be a cause of the
small and lateral attention provided by researchers of audiovisual and written
media. That exclusivity was never satisfactory for us because, above all, to avoid
the complementation with other researchers of mediatizations in moments of
multiple convergences we need to have common fieldwork. Some time ago, a
colleague asked us why we addressed a media phenomenon, according to him,
as lateral as sound, instead of dedicating ourselves to other more prestigious or
massive objects, such as cinema, or as television. We were on the street in an
almost unknown city for both; I could therefore show that there were a large
number of individuals walking, bicycling or even inside their cars, with head-
phones or listening to radio or music through mobile receivers. The question had
its answer in the simple fact that this phenomenon happens in front of our eyes
without requiring any special effort to search for it.
Following a long journey of observation and reflection without establishing
relations with the sound, we have recently decided to pay special attention to
the graphic communication in public places, in the streets, and relate it to the
mediatizations of sound. On this mediatization, evidently happening in front of
our eyes, we found a lot of traces equivalent to the reception of media of sound
in mobility situations. Through the streets, individuals receive this media in their
movement, outside of their will and in depth. There, the individual is selecting,
more or less consciously, among multiple texts that they are later going to remem-
ber and beyond that select what they are going to remember among that diversity.
And that happens, with inevitable differences, in New York, Paris, Mexico D. F. or
Buenos Aires.9 The mediatizations of sound and the graphics in public places can
be called as interstitial just as Roberto Igarza (2009) called the mobile mediatiza-
tions in production, although in these cases it involves exchanges in broadcasting
and only in reception. But both cases require the will of the receiver to receive
and moreover, to interact with the texts s/he is seeking or texts that find her/him.
Certainly, it is debatable whether the mediatization of sound and the graphic
media coverage on public roads is equivalent to television or film media. But
the transformation of television, which tends to rely on the place of the unique
broadcasting unit at home (Carlón, 2009; Verón, 2009), or the multiple formats in
9 Veron accurately describes the similarities and differences between the social observer and
the scientific observer. He found the key difference in the fact that the scientific observer has an
added level of control over his work: that of the scientific system (Verón, 2013: 402–408).
which a film is distributed outside the theatres, shows that these kind of mediati-
zations are increasingly more interstitial and interactive too, although we believe
that the traditional expectations will not disappear completely.
Of course, that perspective will generate a relatively large new field of dis-
cussion, but what interests us here is to emphasize in the attention afforded to
mediatizations with longevity. We have been studying them for decades but the
experience of investigating new mediatizations helps us find new phenomena
and reshape objects. From now on, we will discuss two spectation practices of
very different exchange systems within the mass media:
– the spectatorial position in which receptors have a relatively fixed place in
front of their chosen or accepted mediatization and
– the typical interstitial and interactive position on the new mediatizations,
but present for many decades at least in the media of sound and in graphics
in public spaces, oscillating in the graphic press with advances now in the
audiovisual mediatizations such as cinema and new televisions.10.
10 We have noticed hybridizations between broadcasting and interactions in regards to the pro-
posal of Vorterix.com, the articulation of a FM radio, with a theatre for live performances and a
platform in streaming, however, with very little effect of interactive networking (Fernández, 2014).
4 Conclusions
The mediatizations of sound have been deeply innovative in Western culture as
the original source of the processes of broadcasting, constituted in broadcast-
ing’s basic structures; for example, information systems and the music industry,
key phenomena in the global culture until the arrival of the new mediatizations.
The process of networking, combinatorial expansion of digital, networks and
mobility, puts into crisis much of mediatized systems, including precisely infor-
mation and musical construction. Nevertheless, this profound transformation
does not seem to affect the communication on public highways or mediatizations
of sound. Our streets are wandered by countless individuals wearing headphones
or listening to in-car audio equipment. They are there, facing us and, in spite of
this, that generates little theoretical concern. Our current research shows us that
the important things happening in the culture regarding new mediatizations are
happening, centrally, in the mediatizations of the sound.
The study of the new mediatizations, especially in the field of information
and musical life, obliges semiotics to articulate productively with ethnographic
studies, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, with the complex statisti-
cal developments of big data. The cultural innovation of these mediatizations
requires us to interact with other methodologies while we revalue the specific
contribution of the semiotic approach.
The worlds of graphic media in public spaces and media sound systems have
been much unnoticed amidst the major concerns of society. The unrecognized
importance of these phenomena would continue its strong presence in front of
the eyes of those who decide not to look at those social and cultural practices
outside the predominantly audiovisual or scriptural paradigms.
We have shown that innovation in the strict sense is not built from macro
levels but micro or medium levels of knowledge of the phenomena that we want
to investigate. Theoretical and methodological innovations are not only a novelty
in front of a novelty: for something to be innovative it must cause profound
changes in the theoretical and methodological tissue from which it works. We
cannot innovate from metaphysics, thinking about the big issues in a discipline
such as semiotics, or trying to find something new, to understand some new pro-
cedure between the new and previous mediatizations.
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