This is the first installment of the interview with producer and teacher Alejandro Ángel, in which the concept of peripheral narratives and the role of the media today are explained.
By:
Luis Fernando Gutierrez Cano
Luis Jorge Orcasitas Pachecho
Since the apparently distant 1983, when the MIT political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool published his book Technologies of Freedom, many aspects have been changing and, at the same time, changing, in the so-called new ecology of the media, fundamentally in relation to the audiovisual sector.
The ways of doing, perceiving, analyzing, reflecting, even consuming the media, have ostensibly transmuted in the last three decades from the almost prophetic text of Professor Pool. These transmutations have evidenced an era of media transition, marked by tactical decisions and unintended consequences, contradictory signals and conflicting interests and, above all, unclear instructions and unpredictable results.
Precisely, to understand and, at the same time, reflect on these unpredictable issues, in this edition we bring the concepts of the producer and professor Alejandro Ángel who, from his experience, makes a conscientious analysis of contemporary media events, an analysis that undoubtedly must take into account all the agents involved in the details of the current creative processes, where the story used by the new media, including open digital television, incorporates elements of the language of other media and forms of expression (Castro en Campalans, Renó 2014 p. 87)
Alejandro Ángel is a Social Communicator and Journalist graduated from the Universidad del Norte de Barranquilla (Colombia); Master in Design and Realization of Television Programs and Formats from the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain), and is currently a PhD student in Communication at the University of La Plata (Argentina).
In his career he has developed audiovisual and documentary production works, he is an associate professor and director of the CrossmediaLab of the Department of Social Communication and Cinematography of the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University of Bogotá, he is an executive producer at Armadillo: New Media & Films and Director of the Creative Commons & New Media Bogotá Film Festival. He is the producer of the transmedia documentary Manos de Luz and co-producer of the Puerto Rican documentary Diana de Santa Fe.
1. Contemporary narratives are characterized by their media expansion and a complex and compressed narrative, how is this expansion understood and what are the narrative variations that these audiovisual stories can experience?
Alejandro Ángel: For some time now, there has been talk of contemporary narratives, which have a series of adjustments in relation to what had been done until some time ago. An annotation that should be noted is that, although it seems that they are innovative narratives, in reality they have a lot of time "going around" and what happens is that they have been cataloged within the framework of methodologies; but in reality the subject of convergent narrative is already very long in coming, even before 2001 when Henry Jenkins named it.
I find it interesting to note that media expansion cannot be limited only to formats; at times when we talk about these new narratives, we think it's all a platforming thing and I actually think it's a mixture of a lot of things. One of them is the appearance of this "prosumer" or this slightly more active consumer, which although I consider that in our Latin American context is still something a little utopian, it has already been emerging little by little and has been enhanced from new users a little more critical who are part of the narratives of history.
2. What is the role of spectator today?
Alejandro Ángel: The fact that the viewer is already part of them makes them mutate and have other formats; for example, the theme of authorship: that classic author who delimited in a very marked way what was the path that his story took, and today he seems a spectator who also takes part in that narrative and therefore makes that at a given moment it can change.
Today we have narratives that expand beyond the screen format and we have narratives that bring with them, for example, offline narratives. I find it very interesting (in an era of so many digital narratives) that the process of offline narratives begins to be enhanced so that they are experiential processes in which the viewer can take part directly and live a narrative experience, and not simply consume it.
3. So what does the term peripheral narratives mean?
Alejandro Ángel: With the advent of all this amount of new formats that have emerged with the digital theme, many terms have emerged; transmedia that is like the most recognized, but also crossmedia, hybrid media, transmedia worlds, multimodality, Internet... A lot of terms have emerged where peripheral narrative is one of them. When we speak of a peripheral narrative, we speak of that content that to some extent complements the central content, but that goes beyond the established canons of the initial story that it intended to tell; however, the issue of naming or naming in one way or another is dangerous because something will always be left out.
The interesting thing that has happened with this issue of peripheral narratives is that what was once the "outside", now seems to be the "inside", in other words, peripheral narratives today are more recognized than even the central narratives to which we have become accustomed by the traditional media, then, in a very summarized way: peripheral narratives would be all those narratives that go beyond the central axis of a content, but that largely help to tell it in a better way.
4. Some theorists such as Carlos Scolari point out that the productive inertia of large companies (public and private) of a "monomedia" nature contrasts with the dynamism of small producers. What do you think are the causes of this phenomenon and how do you think that, in a DTT framework in Colombia, this can change in favor of expanded content from open television?
Alejandro Ángel: Without a doubt it is much more difficult for a large company, whether public or private, to generate a change of this mono-medium with which they were accustomed to working to a much more dynamic creation of content that small producers do. This phenomenon is due to the fact that the larger the medium, its production dynamics and workflows are much more complex and therefore changing these workflows becomes a challenge and something very complicated.
Interesting, I would believe, that taking into account not only DTT, but in general the arrival of this lot of new formats or content in Colombia, they no longer imply or force even the small creator or the small producer to have to depend on the large medium but directly have an idea, develop it and share it from digital environments or from networks; this therefore makes competition in the field of content creation much more powerful.
Now there are more possibilities for small production companies and for creators who are still just in the process of creation or production, and therefore, that will benefit, after all, that person who receives content because every time he will have more and more varied content, more niche and more focused on various topics, and not simply what the traditional media had accustomed him to receive as a spectator.
5. In the realm of politics and citizen exercise, we see that the narrative expansions of political communication on social media and user-generated content offerings have the underlying purpose of forming and consolidating a cohesive and participatory community of followers. How does this type of communication and audiovisual dynamics benefit the processes of immersion and political participation of citizens in an eminently convergent contextual framework?
Alejandro Ángel: Without a doubt we are politicians by nature and any evolution of the communicative phenomenon ends up also pressing the political issue. It is interesting to see how even today we are talking about political transmedia; for example, we have the case of Barack Obama, a president who has been totally media thought about convergent environments, and of course all this visibility that he has given to the issue of political transmedia also permeates what politicians are doing today in various countries of the world and that includes Colombia.
This type of communication dynamics that have arisen around digital content and social networks, benefits the political exercise in a broad way: it allows us to be part of it in a much more open and much more dynamic way; Even so, it is important to take into account in the future, in the environment of social networks -for the same fact of anonymity and various types of issues that they bring with them- the care that must be taken so that they do not become what has sometimes happened: in a battlefield in which anything goes and in which disinformation begins to appear as happened in our plebiscite for peace with the creation of content that was used on several occasions to generate problems from the point of view of how citizens received the contents and how they interpreted them.
There obviously comes something more in depth and it is a matter of the need to start also doing a transmedia literacy that is what theorists call the study not only of the media to understand or interpret them, but also, and above all, to the study and interpretation of digital media, networks and other issues that have been emerging.
For this reason, the fact that citizens can actively participate in this type of communication process makes them part of them. They are communicational processes where it is no longer the medium or the politician who gave the information and the viewer received, period; but without a doubt they are dual processes in which the politician and the medium give information, but the citizen by his same capacity for interaction also gives different answers and results, achieving that in one way or another a community and a very strong interaction is generated around these concepts.
6. The development of the Internet and the so-called participatory web makes new narratives seek greater involvement of users and audiences. What strategies to follow to achieve effective results in this type of audiovisual communicative context?
Alejandro Ángel: There is no doubt that Web 2.0 is the one in which the citizens or users themselves are the ones who allow the contents to be enhanced in each of the networks and web pages in which they are currently generated. One of the things Jenkins says is that transmedia is not only about creating multiple platforms of the same content but it is also about generating a powerful participation and a real community that believes in the narrative of the project that is being developed.
One of the main strategies that I should emphasize regarding this issue is to develop a community that believes in the project, it is also the need to start thinking as a society that creates content in constant beta. That previous stage of us as creators of audiovisual content in which we kept almost secret everything we were developing and once we had the project 100% finished was that we shared it with the public.
7. How to take on these challenges?
Alexander Angel: We are in an era of beta versions, we are in an era in which we as creators the first thing we must do is start sharing our content with our possible community; not when it is ready, but when it is at a very early stage of its creation; that's going to allow people to feel part of the decision-making and feel part of the narrative that's being created.
In the same way, it is important to keep in mind that the production process has changed a lot. Before we had very schematic production stages that were pre-production, production and post-production and neither touched the other. Today we have added two additional pieces such as development, at the beginning; and promotion and distribution at the end; In addition to that, the barriers that were in the productive principle have been broken a little and we already work a little in a more transparent, less linear and a little more fragmented way in a very consistent way with what are the fragmented contents of today.
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