Volume index - Journal index - Article index - Map ---- Back
Comunicar Journal 25: Quality Television (Vol. 13 - 2005)
Television and Peruvian Audience in oral and diverse country
María-Teresa Quiroz-Velasco
The television is a subject that worries all of us, from educators, politicians, and intellectuals, to producers and TV makers. When the TV stopped being considered the big responsible of educational failures, and the intellectuals and thinkers had to accept that this phenomena was part of the youth existence, there were new approaches that arose that we will try to revise and understand in this article.
FA recent research done in Perú, made me realize the proved value and sense that the television continues to have in the children and adolescent life, both in cable and opened sign television. It is not at matter of being a technological instrument, but a form of relation through the one children and adolescent inform themselves, entertain, learn, and always develop new forms of relationships. It is not about a strange, extern, and interchangeable instrument. It is about every day practices, cultural ones -along with radio and movies, computer and internet- that has being incorporated to modes of perception and sensitivities, that produces and influences and as a consequence is necessary to evaluate.
As long as the image appeared and became part of the every day and social life, and the education of the youth, it also became a culture support. In spite of that, the adults, -parents and teachers- still used it to illustrate the word, to make the speech stronger and wiser, without really understand the reach that language has as carrier of the meaning. Thus, it requires a severe re-thought that needs to begin with admitting that audiovisual media are part of every day life of people. More than that, it is necessary to accept that the official culture and the school itself are convoked and threaten by that same image culture. Children and adolescent have grown under the influence of the show culture, a culture where the sensorial gratification, being scared of the silence, and a rejection of the static is present. Thus, today's generations prefer the concrete over the abstract, the sensitive over the insight. We should add that in comparison with a humanistic, systematize, and hierarchical culture, the television culture is a mosaic characterized by dispersion and chaos. As Joan Ferrés points out, it is not possible to deny that today youth still lives with the sensitivity related to the visual and intuitive, confronting the urgency of logical thought, conceptual and deductive, demand by formal institutions.
In a country like Perú, a country where the oral communication is still diffused as a characteristic of the every day relations, the image becomes the new way of communication, first the television, today the computer, and then the internet. There are people that transit from oral communication to the image in the screen, without passing through writing.
Keywords
Televisión, mass-media, digital convergency