Production and Editing Practices and the Critical Way of Life in the Documentary HayMotivo.com

Abstract

The documentary HayMotivo.com is composed of thirty-three short films, with the average duration of three minutes each, that can be accessed on the website HayMotivo.com or on the sites that host videos on the Internet such as the page of the newspaper El Pais (www.elpais.es) or on Youtube.com. This article aims to demonstrate through a practical examination how the object-medium, the Internet, and the strategies of production and editing, in terms of expression, create an economy of language in terms of content, experienced by the Internet user-viewer, at the level of enunciation. To that end, we have looked at the site HayMotivo.com as a whole, based on the semiotic approach to practices, proposed by Jacques Fontanille, and analysed of one of the videos that are part of the documentary, “Español para extranjeros”, based on the standard theory of Paris school semiotics. In analyzing the researches in the area of communication that deal with audiovisual products, a common priority found is the technical and technological advancements that provide the convergence of new media. However, little is said about the aesthetic issues and language that arise from these new demands of production, another point we will discuss here on the basis of the Paris school semiotics and its followers. This work also addresses the relationship between the usage of language resources and the constitution of a critical way of life, as the result of independent productions, such as the documentary HayMotivo.com.