Portuguese TV looking to fulfill a promise of participation

Abstract

This article questions what we can call the promise of participation. Its assumptions are based on the current dominant discourses on the new technologies of information and communication. We will note that such discourses keep elaborating on a constantly self- repeating refrain that never ceases to promise wide access and open possibilities of direct individual intervention in the global informational contents and debates, feeding the prospects of new digital forms of political and social citizenship able to promote what philosopher Pierre Lévy calls cyberdemocracy.

This promise is renewed by each new wave of technological buzz. It simultaneously takes by storm the discoursive mainstream of public spheres such as the political, the social, the economic context or the academic, emerging through conceptual frames such as media convergence. These public debates often include the conceptualization of what we can sum up as the convergent screen, to which should converge the technological screens that we use on our daily lives, and with which we interact. Among them, of course, there is the television screen.

We base this article on a thorough study of the television screen that is both theoretical and empirical: it focuses on an analysis of the screen as an apparatus and works on data from Portuguese news channels’ broadcasts to verify or deny the fulfillment of the promise through audience participation manifestations. Our conclusions will nonetheless point out  a  reiterated  confirmation  of  the  institutional  strength  of  the  television  apparatus. Despite the constant technological developments that, along with the digitalization processes, suggest a whole new set of interactive possibilities, the television screen shows clear  signs  of  control  resistance  by  keeping  its  longtime  built  social  and  institutional centrality. It tends to concentrate and attract the main socio-semiological resources of production control and retains the Raymond Williams’ old defined broadcasting features of centralized sequence and flow. This television screen emerges then not as the convergent one that would fulfill the promise of participation, but as one we will call the centripetous screen