ISSN: 1550-7521
ISSN: 1550-7521
Professor of the Postgraduate Program in Communications at Unisinos, PhD in Communications. Unisinos, Brazil
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The article discusses the practices of Justin TV, a live broadcast platform in which some concepts that are important to television, such as real time, broadcaster, viewer, and audio-visual community, are reinterpreted. There are ethical and aesthetic differences between the modes of signifying the real time on the web that need to be better understood. Scenes unfolding in front of fixed cameras displayed on the platform and commented by groups of users resemble Vilém Flusser’s concept of post-history, in which history accelerates toward devices to establish technical images. In a remix of imaginary notions of the beginnings of television and of the concepts of web 2.0, Justin TV becomes interesting to think about the ways in which contemporaneity experiments an audio visualization of culture
Justin TV; Real time; Web; Audio visualization of culture software
Broadcasting, for 24 hours, the inside of a henhouse, carpentry work, or a corner in a neighborhood in the city of São Paulo; finding a group of people that is active for hours or sometimes days on end; exchanging messages in a chat room while watching a live broadcast of a dog about to give birth; or also a channel that re-broadcasts a reality show uninterruptedly, appropriating the programming of a pay television channel and users that accompany the scenes while exchanging messages, including and especially when apparently nothing happens, are some of the most common situations of the live broadcast platform Justin TV (JTV2). Defined as television in its own name, JTV is part of a group of platforms that started emerging in the second half of the years 2000, enabling any user to broadcast live on the web. Ustream TV, Mogulus, Yahoo Live, Blog TV, Stickman, and Live Video are some examples.
Information transmission accompanies the history of communication: from the telegraph (text transmission) to the telephone (sound transmission), going through radio and television (image and sound transmission), there is a centrality of live audiovisual in contemporaneity. We cannot ignore an emergency of these two elements: live and audiovisual in other kinds of devices, such as security cameras, some scientific experiments3, interpersonal communication devices such as Skype, Messenger, the chat on the social network Facebook, or Google Hangout, among others.
Even though we do not deal with these other audiovisual communication devices – which do not declare themselves as TVs nor live broadcasts, but do it – in real time, we emphasize their multiplication. These devices must be taken into account when considering a contemporaneity in which live broadcast and audiovisual features are regarded as central elements in the establishment of several social processes and ways of socializing. Among live video broadcast platforms, Justin TV is particularly productive for the academic look because it regards itself as television and is built as a kind of TV, whose central time is "live" and where solid senses traditionally attributed to TV are redefined: from transmission, broadcasters, channels, and viewers/users, going through the audiovisual community and the television flow as a metaphor of a time where local and global go through an audiovisual broadcast/connection. The goal here is to understand what these live broadcast experiences may be saying about audiovisual means and their media processes that include a contemporaneity that creates them and at the same time is re-created by them.The live video broadcast network Justin TV was launched on March 19, 2007. The history of JTV, as it is officially told4, describes the experience of four friends, classmates at a university in the United States. Led by Justin Kan – who lends his name to the "TV"–, they thought about the possibility of creating something similar to a reality show, uninterruptedly broadcasting a day, a week and a month in Justin Kan’s life. Thus, they connected a camera to a modem and attached it to Justin's cap. It broadcast his movements over the course of a day, even while he slept. The group named the experience of broadcasting everyday life over the internet to viewers lifecasting5, although isolated initiatives to broadcast daily life existed long before on the web and on television within the genre that became known as reality shows and in many other spaces. From the beginning, the idea of a platform was present as an interface where any user could do this type of broadcast.Over its seven years of existence and with the several uses it ended up being put to, the platform reached its current interface. Users create a login with a valid email address and some personal data and already have their own channel to broadcast through a web camera. They can also use the chat room to exchange messages with their viewers or watch and participate in the chat of other live broadcasts. Those who do not go through this procedure to create their login can only be anonymous viewers. They can watch broadcasts and chats, but cannot broadcast nor send messages, cannot be seen except in the total number of viewers that appears below the player where the images are broadcast. The platform frames6 live broadcast in several ways, as what constitutes it, thus re-signifying live television and recycling senses traditionally attributed to that time on TV and to TV itself. In Figure 1, we see some of the visual identities that have already characterized the platform. Three elements stand out in one of them: the user plus one camera would result in the platform JTV, here drawn as an analog TV set with an antenna, reinforcing relations between traditional TV and JTV but suggesting new broadcasters and specially simplified procedures for the operation and constitution of the medium. The other three logos feature a little red dot, in addition to the name or the face of a monkey with a camera. The little red circle on the upper right side represents the live aspect, referring to an imaginary notion of live broadcast brought from the sign that appears in a camera when one is filming or in TV or radio studios when they are live.
Figure 1: Visual identities of the platform Justin TV
The interface, which is largely responsible for the uses and for the construction of senses of the platform, also has frames to share the video in social networks and blogs around the player where the broadcast is performed. Thus, it is possible to broaden live to other media that would not offer this possibility.Throughout the seven years of existence of JTV and with the widespread use of mobile phones to produce videos, the genre of daily life broadcast shifted to a new platform owned by the group, called Social Cam, a platform with a software to capture high-definition videos on iPhone or Android and to share them through the website, with Facebook and Twitter. This platform expresses what JTV intended to do in its beginning, with a broadcast of people's daily lives, even though it is now defined much more as a "social camera", a kind of audiovisual social network and not a TV. Another very frequent use of the platform was broadcasts that brought together communities of gamers. Later, twitch TV, a platform to play video games live, was created by the same group.
Thus, lifecasting, that is, the everyday that is going to be broadcast, found its most characteristic expressions in the platform JTV, while others claimed their own existence in new platforms. Fixed cameras broadcast spaces inhabited by animals, whether they are chickens, cats, dogs, horses or birds. Open or closed environments of a city (a corner, a lan house, a carpentry shop, a bar); events like a religious service or a live radio program broadcast in pictures; and commercial TV shows, generally from paid TV channels (particularly soccer games and reality shows), also are part of JTV's current schedule. In general, it seems that the live aspect that characterizes JTV the most involves fixed cameras that frame certain scenes where everyday facts of life unfold for long periods of time or somehow appropriates the schedule of channels that do this with their own cameras. These broadcasts create a fairly steady community during the days the experience lasts.
TV and real time
To ponder about real time on television, we will address it in two different and necessarily complementary directions: its virtual aspect (also called way of being) and its current aspect (way of acting). It is in these two perspectives that Kilpp (2009) thought about real time on television. First and starting from Bergson, real time would be that uno, universal time, in its elusive, indivisible perspective. Multitude of multiples, real time is an open uno, moving that does not "pass": it unfolds rhizomaticaly and rolls up as a snowball. "It is the time of Being, of duration, without beginning, without end. In it, past and present coexist virtually and do not succeed as generally thought" (Kilpp, 2009, p. 1). The only real thing that exists would be change, the movement from virtual (of pure memory) to current (of matter) and vice versa. The second way in which the author regards real time is the one that spread out on TV with live programming and which constitutes a television construct, a technical image in which senses of real are offered to a time built by the overlay of television frames.
Thinking about it in the first sense, we find a difference of degree and no difference of nature between traditional TV and Justin's TV. TV is regarded, then, as a duration (virtual, memory, way of being, time) that is updated (current, matter, way of acting, space) in an analog TV, in a digital TV, in a web TV and in so many others that still will still be updated or will remain in power, with differences of degree and no differences of nature among all these TVs. When we think about TV's real time in the second sense (current, matter), we can observe the ways it is built specifically on JTV or on network x or y of broadcast television, for example. Justin's real time is regarded, secondly, as an ethicity with more or less solid frames and imaginary notions that are recycled there. The deconstruction of the updated TV on the platform Justin brings us important pronouncements about web TV, about the web as a medium, about the several media processes and about the main protagonists that are seen in this medium.JTV's real time re-signifies a time of television itself, a television ethicity that was built over the more than 70 years the medium exists. Arlindo Machado (2000) points out that television’s original goal were broadcasting real- and present-time images. Out of all the possibilities of television, the live operation turned out to be the one that marked the experience of this kind most deeply, so much so that it is an element that is constantly reinvented on the web and in contemporary times.
Television was born live and developed all its basic repertoire of expressive resources at a time when it operated exclusively live. This remains its most important distinctive trait within the audiovisual universe. From television (as happened with radio, in terms of sound transmission), the recording of a show, its editing and its viewing by the community of viewers may happen simultaneously and that is precisely the distinctive trait of direct broadcast: the reception of events that are happening in other places and in that exact moment by viewers in distant places (Machado, 2000, p. 125).The author highlights the broadcast of images at the moment they take place and in the spaces where this images arrive, thus creating a community without a specific space, a stream that is simultaneously local and global. He also highlights how there has been a contamination between live conditions and the treatment of recorded and edited images. The excess and the incompleteness of real time, according to the author, oppose the treatment that the cultural industry gives to this same time, imposing a kind of quality control in the shape of a certain asepsis, a certain product purification of all of its working brands. In commercial TV, the aesthetics of the finish prevails over the aesthetics of excess and incompleteness. Thus, the live instance copies its finishing from the recorded editing, and the pre-recorded programming copies its real-time effect from the live instance, reaching an aseptic, well-presented, "complete" product, which always seems to be being broadcast in real time with the finishing of recorded programs. Therefore, ethical and aesthetic senses are produced over this "real" that would always be well done, complete, aseptic. A look at TV's real time that is updated on Justin shows us that, on the one hand, the live instance of the beginning of TV, that instance of the single camera, with the absence of editing, is resumed. It is a time that potentially declares the possibility of participation while things are happening, as noted by McLuhan (1999), especially because its incompleteness and excess and its dead times announce a real time that is more similar to daily life outside the TVs. For McLuhan, the constitutive time of the nature of TV favors the presentation of processes more than the presentation of products. JTV's broadcasts lack "shows", ads and other autonomous units that we can see clearly in the flow of traditional TV. With Flusser (2002), a connected camera and a scene unfolding in an uninterrupted flow can be regarded as post-history, that is: devices or boxes that devour texts and vomit images, devour history and vomit post-history. With this, Flusser does not mean that history stops or fails to develop. On the contrary, it rolls faster than before, because it is being sucked into the interior of the device. Events rush towards the device with accelerated speed, because they are being sucked into and partially caused by the device, to the point that weddings or tourist trips happen in order to be photographed and filmed, the author exemplified (Flusser, 1983). The variety of scenes that unfold before the cameras operated by Justin's broadcasters is a clear example of this accelerated rush of history towards the devices, of post-history. Potentially we can think that every real-life scene (a four-dimensional image, Flusser would say) can and, it seems, "must" become a technical, digital, or, in Flusser's words, null-dimensional image.The TV that is updated on the platform JTV, therefore, is a complex remix that evokes television imaginary notions of the beginnings of television overlaid to exclusive senses of the web, especially those associated with what has been referred to as "web 2.0", whose most important constructs are the user, the real time and the audiovisual property. Even though some authors, such as the creator of the web himself, Bernes-Lee (2006), and others7 defend that technological components prior to generation of the web are being used there, we cannot ignore the novelty of this context, at least in a certain sense. Thinking about web 2.0 as a construct, as an ethicity and as one of the main frames of contemporary web and of web audiovisual leads to thinking of concepts such as "platform", "users", "networks", "sharing" and devices to stream video, as well as other devices to store, edit, and remix it. Uses and users become, at least enunciatively and as a construct, the center of web 2.0, the center of Justin TV, a TV for the user, with usability "within everyone's reach". The few interfaces to watch and broadcast, the simple drawings that characterize the platform's communication and the technical operation that is resolved in a few clicks build these senses. Channel "owners" here are not big businesspeople but ordinary users who, with a valid email address, created a free account on the platform. However, if the user can, for example, customize the background of the channel on which JTV's interface is presented, the interface itself with the player and the chat room, the frames of video sharing and previous broadcasts located in the bottom of the channel are established spaces that the user cannot modify.
The viewer and the broadcaster
Relations between the live broadcast and the chat room in JTV's interface establish a complex space that raises a number of tensions while challenging the limits of those who broadcast and of those who watch, raising some questions about the medium. The player where images are broadcast is different, for example, from the player of video platforms like YouTube, which feature play, pause, rewind and forward buttons, recycling the shapes of old videocassette recorders. In JTV, it is only possible to play/pause, that is, to roll the broadcast or stop it, accentuating the live feature, of the time and information that pass and do not come back, the most striking feature of time in media such as radio and TV. In live broadcasts, viewers commonly ask specific questions to the broadcaster, which are answered in real time (regarding it, I say again, as Justin's construct or ethicity). Users who ask that the broadcaster changes camera (in cases when there is more than one camera, such as when Big Brother Brazil is re-broadcast from the pay-per-view format, for example). In the cases of other broadcasts, viewers tend to ask questions and comment through the chat room, asking the broadcaster to address certain subjects or to move the camera so that a person or object of the place where the broadcast takes place is framed or even to correct mistaken information. It is possible to find something similar in other media through a reader's letter or a call from a radio listener or viewer. However, there is an important difference: the connectivity of the participants in the live audiovisual process, that is, the relations between the frames player and chat room enable those who intervene to see the result (or lack thereof) of their demands live.
In several interviews, Justin Kan, the platform's founder, spoke about the first reactions from viewers regarding the broadcasts. Some of them are even available in his channel on JTV or on Justin TV's channel on YouTube (there, JTV acquires other senses, naturally). Before having the idea of the chat room, Kan disclosed his phone number. Very frequently, people interacted with him all the time, in somewhat uncomfortable and dangerous ways, such as when they played pranks on him by giving his phone number as a reference to the police. The "prankers" watched the results of the pranks live on the channel: the police entering Justin Kan's apartment to investigate the complaints.
Other viewers called him in the middle of the night, while Justin slept and broadcast himself live. They woke him up and talked to him in the early hours. Such is the case of the video whose frame sequence appears in Figure 2. In the video, we can see, step by step, the user entering Justin Kan's channel, watching him reading in bed, calling him (it is possible to hear Justin's phone ringing in the image that is being displayed in the user's computer). The young man, who introduces himself as "Beet TV" is, at the same time, a "viewer" of Justin's channel and a protagonist in a new channel, which makes Justin Kan a supporting role. Both are broadcasting live. In the video, in the first frames (in Figure 2, the sequence starts at the bottom right and ends at the upper left) we see the user calling and the images of Justin Kan, who was lying in his room. Later on, Justin Kan changed his strategy. Therefore, the chat room was established. In a way, it also frames the need to intervene in the image that is being broadcast. The interface of Justin TV and of audiovisual media in general establishes a much more tactile relationship; the use value of the image overlaps the display value that characterized media such as cinema and television.
Figure 2: A user of JTV broadcasts himself calling Justin Kan while he is broadcasting live (sequence captured on the website yooouuutuuube.com).
In several ways, movie and television screens set the theme of the exit from the screen to "reality" and vice versa. From Woody Allen's film The Purple Rose of Cairo, in which characters come out of the screen and into the "real world" and "real" characters (at least called that in the film) get into the screen, to the creation, for example, of the first television plans which, as Canevacci (2001) points out, become ubiquitous, immutable, irreplaceable, indestructible talking heads, evoking the feeling that they "pierce" the video and appear next to the viewer. Without forgetting reality shows that create, with their rites, personalization realities, as we addressed in a different moment (Kilpp & Montaño, 2005), a way to "enter the screen" and an opportunity for an ordinary person ("someone like us") to become a television person. These are different ways to interface an inside and an outside of several screens. In the example in question, it is impossible to tell who is inside and who is outside. Justin broadcasts live and is broadcast live, and so is Beet TV. The same happens with the interface between the broadcast and the chat room and what it causes in the building of the live aspect. That a user/viewer changes any questions in the images on the screen or that the broadcaster is interrupted by a viewer are senses that emerge in the relationship between the player and the chat room in JTV's interface.This issue makes us think increasingly of the concept of interface, since JTV is not exclusively within the player, but it is also not only in the chat room. It is between them and the other frames that provide senses to a broadcast to which we must be connected and from which we must share with social networks and other media. It is an interface that enunciates in-transit, connective video.
Dead times, television flow and audiovisual community
In Figure 3, we see a channel that broadcasts live images of a dog sleeping. By reading the chat room, it is quickly possible to understand that the dog is pregnant and may give birth at any moment. The group that watched exchanged messages about the characteristics of the dog, about any movement that occasionally happened and about whether the puppies would be born on that day. However, they also talked about their own dogs, about breeds and behaviors, about their (user's) everyday lives and work, while the image remained virtually immobile. By reading the chat, it was possible to see that the users lived in different points of the world. Someone who lived in London announced he/she was going to have lunch and would be right back, while others said their goodbyes because it was already the middle of the night.
Figure 3: Channel broadcasts a dog about to give birth.
On TV, live and dead time have always been complementary. Arlindo Machado (1990) indicated how the liberation of televisual time has been permanently tamed and repressed in commercial TV and in state-owned TV channels that follow this model, because the timing of these broadcasters must be as fast as possible and their duration more concentrated in order to multiply the invested capital. "Curious contradiction that shakes the conventional practice of television: in a media dominated by 'dead times', each second is gold" (Machado, 1990, p. 75). For the author, "dead" times are those moments of waiting in which nothing is happening, such as in live broadcasts of a soccer match when the ball is stopped, for example, and the moment is used to broadcast ads. Kilpp (2009) remembers the immense and bothersome amount of dead times in reality shows, whose best parts, that is, the parts that seem more interesting to the audience, end up being precisely the edits, post-edits, of which such dead times are suppressed. However, it would be exactly there – in inertia, in the event that does not happen – that the program or software of the TV set, in Flusser's (2002) terms, is revealed more intensely. It is therefore a potentially rich territory for the recognition of the intrinsic nature of TV images, which, among other features already mentioned, are constituted by the fact that they are TV images of extra-televisual time, inasmuch as they are achievements deeply marked by the passage of time, as our own daily lives. We know that
Unlike traditional television, solidly framed by the programming grid, in JTV the flow is defined as an uninterrupted time, with a single programming, usually framed by the title of the channel and by the category in which this channel was created ("entertainment", "animals", "sports", etc.).s
The broadcast is accompanied by users on a summer morning and on a cold winter night for other users connected to the same channel at the same time. This fact becomes irrelevant in determining the flow and the schedule of the TV (Justin TV), but it is highly significant to build a community with global and local features.In the book Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World, Zygmunt Bauman (2004) writes a long introduction about the word "community". He highlights the positive connotation of the term. The lack of the community is felt because there is a lack of security, an essential quality for a happy life. However, the world we live in, according to the author, is becoming less and less able to offer and, at the same time, more reluctant to promise. If there is a tension between security and freedom in the meanings of offline "community", as Bauman notes, and a delimitation between an inside and an outside, that is, spaces that would be safe (the community) and spaces at risk (outside the community), the online "community" is described as a different space that is both inside and outside, flowing, with the characteristics of safety and freedom possible due to the constant approach-spacing flow, connection and disconnection, and also where global/local relations can be enunciatively reversed and where a common user may frame a communications company, as we see the user broadcasting Big Brother Brazil (BBB) in Figure 4. In this case, the conversations in the chat room show us Brazilian users scattered throughout the world who gathered daily to watch BBB 12 in the channel that belonged to "Xurupitinha Paniquete".
Figure 4: JTV channel broadcasts Big Brother Brazil.
Users and the broadcaster exchange words and sentences about the images or about information the participants have regarding the content that is being broadcast, about subjects that intersect with the images of their everyday lives, and about topics which simply arise from a loose word, from an image. In this audiovisual flow, some say goodbye and others arrive. There is no proper ending and beginning in the "programming", there are no shows. There are, nonetheless, constant restarts by the users, exits and entrances, connections and disconnections. Minutes before the images of Figure 4 were captured, the participants of the chat argued if one of the brothers of BBB12, Daniel, should or should not leave the show. This happened while seemingly uninteresting images of two participants in the pool, talking about their lives outside of the show, were being broadcast. Some members of the chat explained that he had violated the rules, while others posted links to Twitter and to some other web spaces where the images that demonstrated this violation would have been leaked. Others provided examples of reality shows in the countries where they live. Others asked the broadcaster ("Xurupitinha Paniquete") to change to other cameras to see what was going on around the house.
A highly tactile, connective way of looking at the images emerges from Justin TV's interface. The images are no longer those displayed, but the ones that emerge between the player, the chat room, the network and contemporaneity itself, which is increasingly auto-understood as a network. Still in BBB, it is interesting to note how the scene of one of the participants asleep for over an hour on the screen of the player made the chat more active than ever. Unlike traditional TV, it is not, then, the sharper editing that motivates viewers/users. Ties permeated by the logic of connectivity are created between users who usually attend a given broadcast. As Bauman (2004, p. 52) states in another text, "relationships" become "connections", "partners" become "networks", because, unlike relationships, blood relations, partnerships and similar notions – which emphasize mutual engagement while silently deleting or omitting its opposite, the lack of commitment –, a "network" is both a matrix to connect and disconnect; it is not possible to imagine it without the two possibilities. For Bauman (2004, p. 25), through "our conversations in chats, cell phones, 24/7 text services", "introspection is replaced by a frenetic, frivolous interaction that reveals our deepest secrets along with our shopping lists." Allow me to comment, however, that this "interaction", although frenetic, might not seem so frivolous, once you understand and keep in mind that the question — the only question — is to keep the chat going. Internet service providers are not clergymen sanctifying the inviolability of unions. These have nothing to rely on but our conversations and texts; the union only exists to the extent that we tune in, talk, send messages. If you interrupt the conversation, you are out. Silence is tantamount to exclusion.
In JTV communities, strangers become relatives through the audiovisual experience. A community that defines itself as global, connected and ubiquitous, in all places at the same time. Naturally, this television experience creates its own codes and changes depending on the current stage of the technique, while it talks deeply about our culture as a technoculture.
Final considerations
We believe we raised some issues here that, despite being at an early stage of observation and analysis, acknowledge some ways to update TV on the web and demonstrate how Justin TV builds and establishes real time and television processes. JTV is constituted between the beginnings of TV and web 2.0 practices, between everyday life and global elements, among users who connect with some margin of appropriation and use of its channels and solid interfaces. However, what draws the most attention of all these practices is the establishment of a highly perishable audiovisual time, which is only valuable as long as it is happening and while the connectivity with broadcasters' and viewers' networks is active. The real time of Justin TV is built as a complex ethicity that demands from users ' connectivity and from the dead times of daily lives. It creates a space of sociability that demands constant participation in the chat room, the multiplication of links to other spaces, of sentences, of subjects that cross the images, escape them, return to them; connect and disconnect.
It is an obsolete, fast technical image, whose expiration date matters because it is on the air, because it takes the images to distant places and brings users to a common area and inserts the broadcast of images as an extra element among so many elements of the interface, efficient as long as it enables connectivity. The question that follows this entire discussion is: what kind of space is this? Foucault (1984) may help us formulate, even in provisional terms, this answer when he argues that every age invents its heterotopias and that, in order to understand our time, we must understand the spaces it creates. In the article Of other spaces, Foucault (1984) warned that belonged to modernity the idea of accumulating everything, of constituting a kind of general file, due to the desire of gathering all the moments, all ages, all shapes, all tastes; of constituting a place of all moments that was outside time and inaccessible to its bite; the idea of a sort of perpetual accumulation of time. Libraries and museums, characteristic of 19th-century Western culture, arose in that direction. The author calls these collections heterotopias and says they happen at the same time that others, related, rather, to time in its most shallow, most precarious, most transitory aspect; second, for example, the party mode, such as fairs, on the outskirts of cities, which once or twice a year fill up booths, showcases, wrestlers, snake-women, fortune-tellers. Both heterotopias, however, would be related because, in them, real time is abolished, but also regained: the entire history of humankind dating back to its origins like a kind of great immediate knowledge. Justin TV and live broadcast platforms in general with their chat rooms and live broadcast resemble the second kind of heterotopia cited by the author. Fleeting spaces in which a given situation that is broadcast in the audiovisual space intensely brings together, for a shorter or longer period of time, a group of very distinct users, whose connection is intense and goes beyond the boundaries of the platform, but is also completely perishable and is only valuable as long as it is happening. Connectivity, a central value of Justin TV and probably of our times, happens on the interface and not exclusively in the transmission or exclusively in the chat room, main frames that give senses to the platform. Justin TV declares the televisioness of each and any scene, of each and any action or lack thereof and its rapid obsolescence. Everything that did not and still does not fit on TV–although those limits are being stretched–could find its space on the platform. The only requirement is that the user be logged on. Being logged on in Justin is creating a time of connection and connecting in video and chat screens that enable direct interference in the broadcast.
Audiovisual connectivity seems to be the way Justin TV invents its heterotopia. This heterotopia for which there are so many media and non-media devices and platforms seem to point, in this interim stage of the technique, to an audio visualization of culture, a trend increasingly present in contemporary times.
Notes
1This article continues the author's doctoral dissertation (MONTANO, 2012)
3In neuroscience, for example, scientists would not have experimented and made certain discoveries without using audiovisual elements and live broadcast. Brazilian neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis demonstrated the ways monkeys control mechanical arms to play video games. The research investigated if and how robotic arms could benefit people who lost arm movement, to whom this prosthesis would offer (artificial) alternatives of movement. In the experiment, a monkey played video games and, at the same time, saw a robotic arm on a screen. He started incorporating this robotic arm as if it was its own arm. Four weeks later, he started learning how to play imagining the movements, without the motor action, moving the robotic arm with its mind. The electric storm of the monkey's brain, broadcast live, fed the 21 programmed models that moved the robotic arm. The monkey performed this activity on the East coast of North Carolina, and its brain activity was sent to Kyoto, Japan, where the robot decoded the primate's brainstorm.
4In: http://pt.justin.tv/p/about_us, accessed 27 December 2012.
5The term was already used in the artistic world to define the technique that enables the creation of exact replicas of the human body in three dimensions.
6 It is important to explain that this article provides continuity to some issues raised in my doctoral thesis (Montaño, 2012), in which I analyzed Justin TV from the methodology of Frames, a methodology that provides the key to read the entire article. Proposed by Kilpp (2010), the methodology of Frames initially implies three conceptual axes, namely: frames, ethicities and imaginary notions. The axes are crossed by the four basic concepts of Bergson's work (1999), which are intuition, élan vital, duration and memory, and by the concepts of imagicity and cinematism proposed by Eisenstein (1990), scope from which the methodology aims to authenticate the audiovisualities updated in each medium, which, however, remain in constant change. In its process, it starts from the dissection of discrete frames that are specific to each medium, which is when they see the assemblies, the frameworks and the effects of meaning. In the authenticated frames, it is possible to see the pictures and territories of experience and signification of media constructs (the ethicities), whose final meaning is intermediated by imaginary notions minimally shared by all participants of communicational processes. In the interweaving of these techno-cultural intermediations, they meet and are affected by one another and the media environments and sociocultural ambiences that produce them crossed.
7Zanoni (2008) summarizes the authors who deny there is novelty in web 2.0.
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