To understand what are web TVs: first searches

Abstract

The subject of the article is web TVs. It presents and discusses results of the first queries made using "TV" as a search term on the Internet, and aimed to verify how they have been enunciated in the Web. For this analysis purposes, we used the frames methodology, which consists of mapping experience and meaning boards which are technically and aesthetically constructed by each medium in order to suggest some meanings to the content it conveys. In parallel, it briefly recovers a history which highlights four television generations in Brazil, where the fourth would be precisely the one of the web TVs. As from the analysis performed, the primary outcome was a weighting that maybe this generation is indeed something different from television, the point zero of the emergence of another phenomenon, still in progress, still poorly understood and explained in the current of TV´s technical and research phase.

Keywords:
Web TV; Television; Frames; History; Technical stage; Research stage

Resumo

O artigo tem por tema as web TVs. Apresenta e discute resultados das primeiras buscas efetuadas na Internet pelo termo "TV", e teve como objetivo verificar como elas vêm sendo enunciadas na rede. Para fins da análise empreendida, adotou-se a metodologia das molduras, a qual consiste em cartografar quadros de experiência e significação construídos técnica e esteticamente por cada mídia para sugerir certos sentidos aos conteúdos que veicula. Em paralelo, recupera-se brevemente uma história na qual se destacam quatro gerações de televisão no Brasil, sendo que a quarta seria justamente a das web TVs. Da análise feita, o principal resultado foi uma ponderação de que talvez essa geração seja de fato coisa diferente de televisão, o ponto zero do aparecimento de outro fenômeno, ainda em curso, ainda mal compreendido e explicado no atual estágio da técnica e da pesquisa de TV.

Palavras chave:
Web TV; Televisão; Molduras; História; Estágio da técnica; Estágio da pesquisa

Resumen

Este artículo aborda el tema web TVs. Presenta y discute resultados de las primeras búsquedas efectuadas en Internet con la palabra "TV", y tiene como objetivo verificar como ellas están siendo enunciadas en la red. Para fines de análisis, se adoptó la metodología de las molduras, la cual consiste en cartografar cuadros de experiencia y significación construidos técnica y estéticamente por cada medio para sugerir ciertos sentidos a los contenidos que transmite. Paralelamente, se recupera brevemente una historia en la que se destacan cuatro generaciones de televisión en Brasil, siendo que la cuarta sería justamente la de las web TVs. El principal resultado del análisis fue una ponderación de que tal vez esa generación sea de hecho algo diferente de la televisión, el punto cero del aparecimiento de otro fenómeno, aún en curso, aún mal comprendido y explicado en la actual etapa de la técnica y de la investigación en TV.

Palabras clave:
Web TV; Televisión; Molduras; Historia; Etapa de la técnica; Etapa de la investigación

Introduction

This article addresses the meaning attributed to a recent phenomenon: the emergence of web TVs. We present and discuss results of the first Internet searches for the term "TV" and how, from the answers and suggestions we found, we branch to "web TVs", in order to see how they are being enunciated on the World Wide Web.

Initially, we outline a brief history of television in Brazil and, under the bias of technoculture¹, we point out what we consider to be the four generations up to the moment, placing web TVs in the last generation. Subsequently, we highlight and justify the approach to the theme through the phenomenological bias and we describe the methodology used in the analysis. Afterwards, we present the results of the searches for "TV" on the Internet, make remarks about the meaning of the terms in general on the Internet and in particular about the enunciations of TV and web TV. Finally, we make some remarks as a conclusion to the article.

A brief history of TV in Brazil under the bias of tecnoculture

We have been researching Brazilian television since 1996. At first, our interest lay in its historical origin, history that we associated to the regional cultures that were "nationalized" in the 1970s. In that research, we observed the creation, development and disappearance of local and/or regional TV stations, particularly in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, comparing it to what happened in other regions of the country. It was the first technocultural generation of Brazilian television: localized, due to the very narrow technological reach of the signal that was available at that time; regionalized, due to the content it broadcast, relating to regional (and regionalist) culture of the limited audience that could receive the signal. At this stage, the dispute over audience between the broadcasters was based on their ability to talk to viewers about what they believed interested them: their cultural identity, their particular interests etc.

At this stage, broadcasters relied on advertising of the most important manufacturing and trade companies in the region and on the consumers of their products for economic support. The best results were achieved by broadcasters who best knew how to combine the content and the interests of the target audience and the interests of the sponsoring companies, and under the bias of their representation of themselves and of the place/region².

In turn, the nationalization of television in Brazil happened along with the nationalization of the country's cultural market, a phenomenon that became more visible in the mid-1970s. At this stage, the role of television was essential, especially that of broadcasters who later became Rede Globo de Televisão³, but also of other broadcasters that were politically or commercially trampled during the military dictatorship in force in the country. For the government, it was about formulating policies and distributing investment into roads and telecommunications, which intended to unify the vast Brazilian territory; for the broadcasters, it was about joining (or not joining) and adjusting (or not adjusting) to the television project formatted by the federal government, aimed at purposes that greatly transcended the strict purposes of television.

At the time, federative Brazil was still a conglomeration of very disparate regions, physically and linguistically very distant from each other, which made communication between them hard; and this hindered (and made more expensive) the circulation of goods and services in the scale and in the modes the multinational companies interested in investing here intended. Thus, these companies demanded that the predominantly regional markets articulated around and from an axis. Therefore, their resources, goods and services would enter the country in an economically strategic geographic center, from where they would be distributed to regions/places. It fell to the states of Rio and São Paulo to occupy such centrality, which they hold to this day.

We never had any doubts about the decisive foreign interference (especially American) in the process of nationalization that was accomplished starting in the mid-1970s in the country. It was made possible, in what matters to this article, through investments in telecommunications, which technologically allowed television broadcasts to reach the entire territory via satellite. But we also believe that this did not take place without resistance from the regions and their idiosyncrasies, which we tried to demonstrate in the book and in articles in journals in which we published results of the research on the history of television in Rio Grande do Sul: during the years in which the changes took place, there was a strong outcry from local stations, from state governments, from television professionals, from the press and from the companies, from the intelligentsia and from politicians, predicting the price that would be paid for such changes.

And the price was, in fact, high. The business model used in the first generation of television was annihilated due to political and economic reasons: many major sponsoring companies went bankrupt; the signal and the images of the shows of broadcasters in the Rio-São Paulo axis developed a technical quality that was unsurpassed by local broadcasters; important television and advertising professionals moved to the headquarters that started to operate in Rio and in São Paulo etc. In this context, some local stations still attempted to survive by creating partnerships and associations with the broadcasters in the axis, in which they were always subordinate companies; and the model of the networks (headquartered in the axis) ended up being an imposition in the new business model implemented during the second generation of Brazilian television. It is not possible to ignore the fact that this second generation of television is technologically linked to the modes of recording, editing and distributing shows and to the modes to be able to broadcast in real time and over long distances the live programming of the broadcasters.

Currently, a phenomenon that is (only apparently) diverse is occurring, in which now is the time for national powers to be subjected to global powers. We believe that the migration from analog to digital is a necessary technological change. However, in the rampant, uncontrolled globalization that we are witnessing today, it inertially and greatly affects public policies and major arrangements that companies need to carry out to penetrate this expanded context. Considering this perspective, it is once again necessary to reflect on the clash that broke out internally in media-based communication, now between the regional/national market (to which we associate offline TV) and the global market (to which we associate online TV).

Just as before, we believe that the ongoing transition to the third generation of television is not happening without tensions and resistances of offline analog media, but we also have no doubts that, despite this, it will be effective and that Brazilian television will be entirely digital and with inclusion on the Internet before long.

In both historically-dated cases, however, we understand it is not mere technological progression; we believe that in the mid-1970s Brazilian television distinguished itself (updated itself) preserving the operating logics of its essence: stream programming. And it is now again distinguishing itself (updating through digitalization), although it may become something else, regarding the operating logics of stream programming (its essence) from its inclusion on the Internet.

Clarifying. In the course of our research, we authenticated enunciative television practices of itself in different places: in program schedules, in the shows, in ad breaks, in the aesthetics, in the assemblies inside the frames etc. We concluded and defended that up to a certain point of the techniques the difference or intrinsic quality of television in relation to other audiovisual services was in the stream programming, in the way it assembled the parts or segmented times of what it broadcasts. Concerning that technical stage of TV and at that time of the research, we proposed that the medium image or essence (sic) of television would be what we call image-duration, following original formulations by Henri Bergson (2010). This happened when TV practiced countless enunciative strategies of itself as a medium compliant to the time unwinding in the world of life, daily, stage in which images of the analog or digital clock or even oral texts and graphics related to the passage of time in clocks and chronometers, appeared on the screen in many stations, among other images of time.

When these enunciative marks became problematic already in the early inclusions of offline TV on the Internet, our research considerations also had to be questioned. Sometimes, we even went through a crisis and almost gave up following the updates of the object, thinking that we had lost it along the way.

However, in the systematic monitoring we have been doing of the evolution of the phenomenon, everything leads us to believe that, despite the trampling and the acceleration of the convergence of media, devices and technologies, what keeps defining what we call television is still stream programming - the most solid and lasting frame on offline TV.

And that is why it is still taken as a very productive reference in the comparison we make between the appearances of television content in different media and devices.

Subsequently, we provide a partial account of the research "Audiovisualities of web TVs", which continued the research "Digital audiovisualities" (in which we sought to understand the crossings that the inaugural logics of digital videos available on the Internet affect the traditional logics of television - which digitalizes itself by law). We hope to be able to demonstrate and justify in this brief account which are currently the substantive questions that guide us.

For a phenomenology of television

We adopted the perspective that the medium is who/what best talks about itself in its enunciative practices of itself and of what it broadcasts. Once again, we take this phenomenological ontology from Henri Bergson (2010). Among the philosopher's many polemic yet productive theses, and taking into account what matters in this article, we point out that:

• all things (sic) have two modes: being (its virtuality) and acting (its updates), and in each of its updates there is something that lasts: its essence, substance or becoming;

• television acts (sic) distinguishing itself from itself, updating itself. In this distinguishing process, there always remains a reservation of happening, which is found in its virtuality, its mode of being (sic) television;

• television is, itself, one of the possible rhizomatic updates of a thing that is genetically previous in the creative evolution of the species (sic): audiovisual, for example; or tele-visual, a term which we have been using lately to understand and explain the current phenomenon: the tele-visualization of culture.

Clarifying. Until recently, we defended that an audio-visualization of culture was going on, especially due to the remarkable interference of all kinds of digital videos that mediate interpersonal communication, especially on video platforms on the Internet and on mobile phones.

Recently, however, we have noticed how much such videos are aesthetically referenced by television audiovisualities and how much television content appears in nontelevisual media.

On the other hand, in a historical perspective, we see that television (as an idea, entry and dream/Communication project) precedes both the audiovisual sector and the medium TV. For example: in the 19th century, references to something called television already appeared. Its presumed characteristics are now materialized both in the medium TV and on the Internet and on mobile devices.

We have also been closely following the changes tested by offline TV stations to penetrate the media convergence: they are changes that affect usual meanings of television, that distance them from those that are usually enunciated by offline TV, and that adhere more to the meanings of we are now calling tele-vision.

The questions we raise, then, are: in what and how does online TV affect our understanding of television (if it does)? or, better and before: in what and how does it become something different or not?

This matters because we believe a fourth generation of Brazilian television has been arising, considering that, in summary, the first would be the local/regional generation that prevailed until the mid-1970s; the second, the national generation, network-based and with satellite broadcast; and the third generation is the one that operates offline and online. The TVs in the first, second and third generation did not necessarily disappear or will disappear - on the contrary, it is even possible to imagine that they will still coexist, at least for a long time, along with those in the fourth generation.

The fourth generation, which we are addressing here, is born on the web that is heavily loaded with meanings that resemble the TV (both the offline and the online). However, we believe it is the "something else" referred to above. Still in the absence of a better alternative, we call it web TV.

Methodology

We have been investigating the meanings of themselves that TV stations have been offering us in a set of frames or territories of experience and meaning that we call frames, which, most of the times, can be found on the image and sound opacity (they are not there to be seen or heard) of the content substance (what is supposed to be seen and heard) that stations repeatedly produce and/or broadcast (KILPP, 2003). The way of conducting these investigations was gradually systematized and formulated as the "methodology of frames" (KILPP, 2010).

It involves deconstructing in the terms proposed by Jacques Derrida, discussed by Nascimento (2005) the object and the theoretical and analytical criticisms regarding the object, and inventing other objects or other ways to look at the objects. The procedures take into account intuition (proposed and practiced by Henri Bergson and systematized as a method by Deleuze in Bergsonismo [Bergsonism], 1999) to formulate what the philosopher called the real problems of research: taking the object as a combination of two trends - its becoming and its rhizomatic updates on the matter - and contemplating the becoming of the object (its duration, in time), yet starting by carefully observing what remains of it in the materialities (in its shape, in space).

From these two parameters (deconstruction and intuition), in the clash with what is empirical, we: 1) cruise, map and collect to constellate through elective affinities⁴ the frames and framings⁵ that seem to be involved in the meaning of the object; 2) remove from the stream small sequences in which such frames and framings are repeated; 3) dissect them technically: perform a decoupage of the images set in frames, planes and sequences; 4) show (in a verbal text with images) results of the analysis of the effect of the frames and framings on the presumed meaning of the content conveyed.

Thus, we see that the digitalization of TV is being accompanied by its inclusion in the processing of media convergence. Until now, the convergence has been largely mediated by the Internet, and, from it, to mobile devices - and back to offline media. This means that the digitalization has been including - in old and new media emerging in the convergence - new frames and framings of the content broadcast in increasingly different devices used for their viewing.

We want to understand the enunciations of themselves that are practiced in this complex scenario by online TV stations, both those that also exist offline and those that only exist online (which are those created on the web), since the medium Internet has its own logics to:

• frame what it stores in databases;

• frame the modes to access such data;

• frame what the viewer searches while browsing.

The word search (or one of its icons) appears in virtually all digital interfaces as a link that refers to an interesting or useful locus of the stored database; behind the link, in the opacity, there is a piece of software that organizes content and the user's presumed interests.

This tool may be the most solid frame of any content broadcast on the Internet, since it is from it that browsing and the access to content that interests the user begin and continue. For such reasons, we began the research with a search, on the Internet, for the knots relating to the keyword TV. These knots are programmed by the software under the terms that will be referred below.

First Internet searches for TV

When you are not a habitual, expert user, most times you begin the "search" on some of the best-known search sites.

Google is one of the largest and most used Internet search sites. Therefore, we used it as a starting point. In it, at the first click of the mouse, the software provides these two alternative responses: "results" (of the search we performed) and "suggestions" (for new supplementary searches, and, at ones discretion, more specific than the one one performed initially)⁶.

Thus, in mid-2011⁷, when the research was designed, the following "results" and "suggestions" appeared in the search engine Google for the terms TV, web TV, and Internet TV (in that order), with which we begin the cartography:

Search for TV

• Results: webtv

• Suggestions: online tv; free online tv; tva; tv gol; live tv; free tv; tv gazeta; tvz; tv globo;

Search for web TV

• Results: webtv

• Suggestions: webtv; webtvcn; web tv gênesis; web tv fpf; free web tv; web tv canção nova; web tv redentor; web tv globo; webtv marista; webtv uninter;

Search for Internet TV

• Results: unspecified

• Suggestions: after some that do not matter here, "How to assemble a web tv" appeared. By clicking on that suggestion, several sites that taught "how to do your own" TV on the Internet appeared.

A little over a year later, the software kept suggesting the same sites for the first and the second terms, in an insignificantly different hierarchy. But the answer found before for the third term was not found anymore. In its place, some sites that also appeared in the search for the first two terms appeared, and many sites that taught "how to do your own" TV, connection, antenna etc.

In a very subordinate situation, far beyond in the score of sites of the first group, we find Make Internet Shoot, Edit, Publish and..., and, in the second group, BROADNEEDS - Do seu jeito [BROADNEEDS - Your way].

We then performed a new search for the term "How to assemble a web tv" and found several answers, in a greater number and weirder than those obtained in the previous search. However, it is not necessary to list them here.

The meaning of the terms on the Internet

That is, mainly in the form of "results" (which is the most direct response of the tool to the search initiated by the user), Google associated TV and web TV equally to webtv; and there were no results on the search for Internet TV. Thus we understand that the software first spelled (invented) the term webtv; then reduced the terms from which we performed the search for this term created by it, ingesting over the name of the things we searched.

This is one of the logics of the "smart" digital technology. Word auto-correct, for example, is always suggesting that we change the spelling of terms that it does not recognize and proposing syntaxes and styles that are not ours. Many times, the corrections are relevant, productive and respectful; but often they are interferences of the software on our modes of expression.

Chats, for example, also frequently suggest "telegraphic" expressions that combine letters and graphic symbols that only those who are "hip/in" understand. Therefore, either we learn them and use them or we stay on the sidelines of the "language" that is spoken (written) there. It is all right; however, these codes have spread out of the environment, in emails and even in academic texts that deal with similar themes, making the way we wrote, read and communicated before the Internet obsolete.

The speed and ephemerality of linguistic changes are scary and easily and quickly lead to the exclusion of all those who are not remotely connected to the process of creation and dissemination of language. When this is also associated with the planned obsolescence of pieces of hardware and software, the problem becomes almost unsolvable for those who are not experts or who are not used to it.

Another logic of digital technology relates to the metaphorical use of terms used in analog communication (including face-to-face human communication) to sometimes designate totally different things, which therefore are enunciatively made the same or at least similar enough. The most striking example is Windows itself - a window; surely the digital window of Windows has nothing to do with the notion of window (to the world) in the analog world of device-mediated communication.

Another example, more consistent with the object under study, is the "channel" of a web TV on the Internet, which designates something absolutely different from what we understand analogically as a television channel.

In all cases, we emphasize that they are media constructs that we call ethicities, whose identity meanings are suggested in a composite of frames and framings practiced repeatedly by the media while broadcasting their content. Once again, we say that these frames and framings have no meaning in themselves and are in areas of high opacity for the viewer and the user: they are not there to be perceived; on the contrary, they are designed as unobtrusively as possible. Their function is to hierarchize the emphases and provide some meaning to the content (the substance of the messages).

It is important to highlight these preliminary linguistic issues so that we can move forward in the analysis proposed and in the research, which regard them as premises, but intend to go far beyond them. However, they alone would be enough to conjecture that there is another television (or a different enunciation of TV) on the Internet, different from the one we know offline.

Enunciations of web TV and web TV on the Internet

We emphasize that Google did not suggest that what implicitly enunciated widespread interactive meanings to the uses that the platform provides to searchers of its searchable items (information stored and categorized in the site's database) were part of the Internet, but of the Web. There is a framed meaning that the results and the success of the search depend both on the competence of the program (software) and on the (technical) competence of the searcher.

Subsequently, it is also important to insist that, in Google's search engine, the words TV and web TV resulted in webtv. Thus, the terms enunciatively became the same thing or variations of the same thing. In the "suggestions" for the term TV, however, and for the term web TV, Google formed associations that distinguished one from the other.

Therefore, it is curious that in the two searches offline and online TV stations appeared, some of which were referred to in the two categories. TV Globo, for example, in the first search appears as tv globo and in the second as web tv globo. From this finding,

• we hypothesized that Google submitted to the power of the network, which we found unconvincing;

• we admitted that there are as many and as diverse appearances of Globo's companies on the Internet (with their enunciations of themselves and of their plurality) which by themselves would explain and reasonably justify the associations made by Google's search software;

• we considered that this is an algorithm whose logic we have only recently started to realize. This logic is inherent to the environment and does not necessarily exclude the previous alternatives, but is not subjected to (only) them.

It is also interesting to note that in the two searches the gratuitousness of the exhibition was reaffirmed in "suggestions" subsumed as free online TV and free web TV. It is interesting because as far as we could ascertain the images available on the Internet that cannot be accessed for free relate only to web TVs. Offline stations that are also present on the Internet are not part of their scope. However, in the operating logics of the medium, this warns about the presence of a presumably more democratic character on the Internet (or on the Web, as Google suggests) than in previous (offline) media.

Finally, it is also interesting to note that the "suggestions" show networks that are presumably TVs or web TVs that thus were "read" by the software as belonging to one category or the other, and in relation to which only in the first case the site referred to its online character; in the second case, it referred to its Web character.

What would that be indicating regarding the enunciations of the medium about web TVs? A stage of the technique in which the zero point of the phenomenon is still indiscernible (tricking the programmers themselves)? Or a stage of the technique in which the primacy of the enunciation is disputed?

So far (according to Google's "results" and "suggestions" and according to the methodology used), we authenticate the following alternatives to understand the enunciations regarding the TV:

• each and every site related to television that is on the Internet in any way can be understood as webtv;

• each and every site related to Internet television that is on the Internet in any way can be understood as webtv;

• each and every site related to TV as medium, device (support) or signal distribution (paid or free) that is on the Internet in any way can be understood as webtv;

• each and every site related to anything that is related to TV or to television that is on the Internet in any way can be understood as webtv.

In these four sets (or collections) of sites that emerged from the search for the three terms with which we started the research, in the "results" and "suggestions", they (the terms) were reduced to the same designation. This is an intrinsic translation made by Google's software, a phenomenon that, thus reported and understood, puts into a crisis and criticizes an established notion, which may be authoritarian (and we questioned ourselves about that) and tends to bind the authorship of any media product to a human subject. Wouldn't this be revealing conceptual problems concerning the communicative threshold of the human and that of its media extensions?

Relating things that are quite diverse and differing seems to us to be a symptom of the stage of the (machinic) technique and of studies on the medium, just like the index adopted by pieces of software and algorithms to collect or relate things we sometimes considered to be quite distinct hitherto.

Assuming that, on the terms proposed by Goethe, read by Benjamin, the affinities are elective⁸ which would then be, in the stage of the technique and of the studies on the medium, the technical and enunciative elements that would allow triggering, from the stored databases, those souvenir-images⁹ of TV that interested us when we started the search? That is, what is the idea of TV that remains in the collections (of "results" and "suggestions") invented by Google's search engine from its own database?

With such questions and remarks we are suggesting that the enunciations of TV and web TV on the Internet are also being rehearsed (tested) by the set of pieces of software (in its current technical stage) used to archive (collect) and provide the person searching with certain (enunciative) answers to their searches.

Final considerations

The considerations that we will present below are only final within this paper, which relates to our first Internet searches to understand what are web TVs from the enunciations of themselves practiced by the medium under the composite of frames and framings it practices. As for the research we are reporting, the considerations are the result of a first approach to the object, giving them a more questioning than conclusive character.

First of all, and far beyond the research under consideration, we are seriously considering that research in general neglects the meanings of:

• local, regional, national, and global;

• television and/or other media.

Such meanings, however, are deeply involved in contemporary audiovisual production when it is regarded as being mediated or mediatized by analog technologies and/or by digital technologies, and would deserve more attention from research.

It is not just about the interference of the Internet on the globalization process or about the fact that it facilitates media convergence and the dilution of boundaries between things until then known as such things. It is, even more than that, about the correlation between the digitalization of media content and the acceleration of the transcendence of any form of individuation (of an individual, of a place, of a region, of a nation, of a medium etc.) in the terms in which we understood it analogically.

Obviously these terms have been becoming obsolete and insufficient to analyze the contemporary technocultural situation; but that does not mean we should ignore them. Instead, we need to consider how and why they become less important, and, in a perspective that is not nostalgic or melancholic (and even less in a boastful perspective!), which comes from such radical changes of perspective, inside which, for example, the primacy of the subject and of the identity (and here we mean, in a broader way, anthropocentrism) is real and radically in crisis.

Secondly, in this paper we assume and authenticate in the analysis that there are essentially two televisions on the Internet, two different things designated equally as TV. We provisionally named these two things offline TV on the Internet and web TV. They are clearly distinct in nature (and not only in degree) because the first is significantly related to offline logics adapted to the Internet, resisting, however, to the latter; while the second is expressing itself naturally under the operating and significant logics (relating to the own frames and framings of the medium) of the Internet in their constitution as difference, noticeable in the provision of meanings that are peculiar to what it broadcasts or provides to the searcher, even if it mimics preceding (offline) logics. Due to the subtleties that distinguish the two things, it is also necessary to clarify our understanding about what are offline TVs and online TVs.

Even if you try to do this considering a generalizing ontology previous to the Internet (we see the investment in an ontology of this kind - too risky, incidentally - in several texts by various authors), we understand that it is very hard to discern today what is online from what is offline, first of all because the meaning of the terms has been substantially changed by the digital technologies that spread on computer-mediated communication.

We also understand that the meanings of the analog and digital terms, tough recent, are in as much a crisis as the older terms - of media and of representation, for example. We found that several authors in various texts have been questioning them. We have been more interested in advancing the perspective that questions the notions of analog and digital from two non-exclusive alternatives: would we be referring to an analog-digital technological character or to an analog-digital aesthetic character? If we adopt the first, or the second, what we say will be something completely different. In the second, for example, which interests us the most, we can think of an analog aesthetic built digitally and of a digital aesthetic built analogically.

Considering the brevity of this text and the complexity of the terms, we decided to reduce the questioning to the following conceptual proposal as final considerations, regardless of the enunciative practices of the media (and which should therefore be read, in the methodological intercourse, as initials of the research), highlighting that, even if we are convinced that, on the Internet, regardless of the condition of analog or digital origin of the images, they were made digital - that is, they are images whose origin (in this case the last and not the first) is a binary code that is configured as an image at the time of its exhibition:

• the meaning of offline is assigned to television content that is broadcast (exhibited) outside the Internet, even though the broadcasters replicate them on the Internet;

• the meaning of online is assigned to television content that is broadcast (exhibited) outside the Internet and replicated on the Internet, and also to content produced by broadcasters that only exists on the Internet, which we now strictly call web TVs.

Based on such a point of view, the enunciations addressed here of the media Internet about what are web TVs get mixed up and tend to confuse our understanding. However, they undoubtedly point to a convergence that goes beyond the limits of the techniques towards the limits of the concept. That is, the knowable itself starts being put into an epistemological crisis, which, in parallel, put the ontology of the TV image, and, we venture to say, image in a broader sense into crisis.

• 1
  Here, technoculture is subsumed under a critical view of the technologies in action on the culture(s) and under a critical view of the culture(s) in action on the technologies, as proposed by Fischer (2013). It is a game, according to Flusser (2011), between culture and the device.
• 2
  The partial results of this research are published in several journals. The end result was published in a book titled Apontamentos sobre a história da televisão no Rio Grande do Sul [Notes on the history of television in Rio Grande do Sul] (Kilpp, 2000).
• 3
  Globo's decisive role in this process relates to several factors, among which we highlight the way it qualified the management of its business based on the famous and disputed deal with Time Life; the way it qualified the signal of its broadcasts, and, in parallel, established a technical quality standard for the images it broadcast; the way it managed to introduce shows strongly related to Brazilianness without ignoring regionalisms into its schedule; the way it managed to dubiously manage its relationship with military governments and censorship.
• 4
  According to propositions by Walter Benjamin noted in his files, which were gathered in Passagens [Arcades Project] (2006).
• 5
  Framings are the technical and aesthetic assemblies practiced inside the frames.
• 6
  We would possibly find other results and suggestions in other search sites; but we believe that neither its operating logics nor the enunciations would be very different.
• 7
  One of the features of the Internet is the speed with which the stored data and the ways to access them are apparently made other. The very architecture or design of the interfaces has a great volatility. The fleeting novelty - quickly replaced by another - must not trick us, however, and blind us with regard to the fact that the novelty and its ephemerality are media constructs of the Internet in its way of acting. Virtually, it is always about the same thing in its way of being. Thus, even if today it is possible to find other "results" and "suggestions", they are just other updates with the same duration. Media archaeology has been studying this phenomenon (in accordance with the terms addressed by Fisher, 2015, for example). The updates that we would find on a similar search, today, would possibly have little effect on what we are proposing.
• 8
  We emphasize that Benjamin (2006) used this statement by Goethe (which is the title of the 1998 book "Afinidades eletivas" [Elective affinities]) to suggest cartographic criteria to relate images of constellations invented by the researcher. Inside them, there would be dialectical images that would light the entire constellation because they would be critical images of the image, because they would support the tension between what they were and what remains of them in what they still are.
• 9
  Here, we are calling upon the notions by Bergson (2010) to explain the activation of souvenir-images by the need to act in the present.

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  May-Aug 2016

History

• Received
  26 Oct 2015
• Accepted
  28 May 2016