Creative industries: visualization of communications and aestheticization of media forms

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Introduction

Improvements in innovative technologies have a direct impact on the social space and the media market, forcing producers of media products to update and increase their competences and skills in line with the requirements of the digital age. This is due both to the emergence of new professions in media content production, media management, marketing, sales, promotion of media products, advertising and PR, and to the recognition of the growing creative and economic potential of the creative industries, including the media industry, with the hope of the significance of their humanitarian contribution to the development of the digital future. This recognition is evidence of the importance of the spiritual and educational mission of contemporary media structures, including their business component, aimed at transforming the media market into an active segment of the digital economy.

The problems of visualization (from lat. visualis ‒ visual), whether in the study of ideas, symbols, images, subject, object, time and space, cinema and photography, is discussed in scientific circles with the onset of the millennium actively and fruitfully. This topic is reflected in many domestic and foreign publications, articles, monographs, conferences and scientific publications are devoted to it (Chen, 2005; Urazova, 2008; Gerasimova, 2008; Manovich, 2013; Shevchenko, 2014; Fedotova, 2016; Lazutova, Volkova, 2017; Baumann, 2018; Dekavalla, 2020; Urazova, 2021; Matsko, 2021; Zarifian et al., 2022; Maier et al., 2023). The peculiarity of the topic lies in its versatility and multi-aspect. The interpretation of the term “visuality”, understood as visibility and cognitive perception of the depicted, is extrapolated to the widest layer of research in the humanities, such as philosophy, sociology, psychology, neuropsychology, art studies, visual and screen arts, mass media, linguistics, literature, culture.

From imagination to visual representation

The multifaceted properties of visualization, characterized as “the quality of visible perceptibility” (Gerasimova, 2008, p. 10), are closely related to the individual's imagination, correlate with his sensory-emotional and mental experience, as well as knowledge, which is expressed in spiritual practices, whether of an intellectual-creative and/or behavioral nature. It is no coincidence that Doctor of Philosophy I.A. Gerasimova justifies the term “visualization” in a number of senses – as “the ability to make objects and processes visible” and reveals this concept as “vision”, implying “knowledge, awareness, understanding”, which “is given not only through vision, but also through other senses – touch, hearing, taste, sense of smell”, supplemented also by “subtly intelligent emotions”. In general, researchers distinguish between externally-oriented visualization, when an individual's attention is directed outward, that is, to what a person can contemplate, and internally-oriented visualization, which means concentrating the vision of reality on a mental level, for example, on an idea, subject or object in their conditionally-mental representation. The technique of such visualization is especially developed among people of creative professions: artists, composers, actors, directors, screenwriters, researchers and journalists. In other words, the highest degree of imagination is possessed by the one who has imaginative and analytical thinking, observation and intuition, who is able to direct his knowledge, mental and cognitive abilities to create original images previously unfamiliar to man in content and form. However, it is important to note: any innovative project is based on the harmonization of the means of artistic expression and the aestheticization of its form, which requires the performer to immerse himself so completely in the creative principle that he is speculatively integrated into the object of creativity, he becomes a creative process.

Relying on the modern categorical and terminological apparatus, it should be clarified: visualization of communications has been inherent in the media historically, since the nature of the existence of media a priori is based on the involvement of the audience in the semantics of information. According to Yu.M. Lotman, “every text, in a broad sense, contains an image of an ideal audience, which affects the real audience, forming the norm of its self-image” (Lotman, 1992, p. 36, 114, 161). This conclusion cannot be ignored, since the strategy of mass media development is initially based on a spiritual and educational mission focused on expanding the consciousness of the masses, the growth of ideas in society about civilizational development in the future.

However, such an angle of communication with the audience prevailed to a greater extent during the dominance of the print press, where priority was given to artistic and journalistic genres ‒ essay, feuilleton. The language of these publication genres had aesthetic and expressive properties, was figurative, expressive, metaphorical, and the semantics of the text was built on an internal form ‒ composition. Thus, the leading communication tool was the word, mentally visualized in the reader's mind at the described event, phenomenon. The text printed on paper generates a lot of associations in the individual's mind, which is important for the development of reflexive thinking. It should also be noted that in the digital era, the expressiveness and metaphoricity of the media text have shifted to on-screen communications, where the expression of visual and audiovisual images dominates in the form of an image, without requiring verbal expressiveness.

In the periodical press, there were other types of visualization of interaction with the reader, expressed in the graphic design of publications, texts, in the publication of drawings, photographs (Berezhnaya, 2018, pp. 103–106). The illustrative series of printed publications changed gradually, in accordance with technological progress at each turn of history, and the infographics of various types that are in demand today are a clear confirmation of this. However, the educational mission of the media, designed to form a spiritual and intellectual segment in the national economy, remained unchanged. The task of the media was, and is, not only informing the population about the realities of objective reality, but also the development of reproductive imagination, stimulating the recreation of mental images, the formation of associative and divergent (creative) thinking in the audience when assessing social reality. And in this regard, cinema, which initiated the development of on-screen communications, distinguished by a special artistic expressiveness and imagery of the mise en scene when capturing events, made a principally different, truly fundamental contribution to the development of visual communications. After a while, television was also connected to the screen type of communications, whose products entered the homes of consumers, became a natural and daily leisure, expanding through the screen the imaginative representations of society about what is happening in the country and the world. However, the advent of the digital age and the emergence of the Internet as a new communication space has changed a lot in the consumption of media products. Priority was given to screen communications, the prevalence of information in screen form, characterized by an accelerated process of perception. It takes a person 13‒14 milliseconds (thousandths of a second) to identify a visual image, understand and characterize what he saw (Urazova, 2015, p.143).

Industry for the mind and senses

“If we needed to identify an industry that would develop fastest in the 21st century, it would be the entertainment industry for the mind and senses”, wrote Danish futurist scientist Rolf Jensen in his work “The Society of Dreams”, the name of which was supplemented by the decoding: “How the coming shift from information to imagination will transform your business” (Jensen, 1999). This book presented a futurological cross-section of the future world, which justified the restructuring of the world market, changing the priorities of business, restructuring industrial relations, adjusting the needs of social actors, and other details of transformations. From the author's point of view, the Dream Society is replacing the Information Society as a result of the impact of technological progress, the adaptation of high technologies in the life of countries. The author builds his main thesis about the transformation of being on the sign of emotionality of goods and services, which, rapidly updating, flood the market. Therefore, the image and the picture become an “important information carrier”, the main means of communication of society, since it is the image that is instantly imprinted in the subconscious of the individual. Another type of commodity product is stories, myths, legends that attract the attention of the consumer, awaken his imagination. As noted in the work, automation of production and robotization free up a person's time for mental and creative work, contribute to the creation of new types of markets with signs of emotionality. For example, the market of care, the market of peace of mind, the market of beliefs, spiritual closeness, the market of adventures and others based on the image and aesthetics of impressions, spiritual priorities of a person.

And indeed, for almost two and a half decades, digital and Internet technologies, including software, have fundamentally changed the information space (national/global), which now appears as a multimedia and multi-platform, which accumulated information flows not only of professional media, but also a lot of amateur media products produced by the so-called “producer for himself”, distributed in verbal, infographic, audio, video, audiovisual forms. At the same time, at the current stage, a mobile phone has become a particularly productive means of communication. There are now 5.56 billion unique mobile subscribers around the world, equating to 69.1% of the global population. Mobile phone adoption increased by 2.7% over the past year, thanks to almost 150 million new users.^[1]

The intensity of a person's behavioral activity of digital time only emphasizes the highest level of human need for various types of communications, his attitude and motivation to create new images, symbols, signs in media form. It is also confirmed that the desire to reproduce media products in an individually creative form becomes the norm for a modern individual, characterizes his mode of being through process, formation, movement and activity within being itself (Fromm, 2023). Nevertheless, it is worth clarifying: the identification of the genesis of human natural aspirations became possible thanks to social networks, which empirically confirmed the individual's need for the development of creative abilities. Thus, having acted at the initial stage as an experimental public platform, social networks have liberated the consciousness of the masses in terms of the features of metacognition, gave users a sense of confidence when studying new ideas, testing methods and techniques of thinking, mastering new skills, so that the “producer for himself” could, by analogy with professional media methods, publicly work with the audience, create media products. Undoubtedly, new technologies, the tools of template production built into social networks, and the functioning of the digital media space contributed to this.

But something else is important here, namely the main mission of the media, their effective interaction with the audience in different periods of history. In other words, by communicating with the audience and promoting visualization methods in various forms into the social space, the media awakened in the minds of the masses the need to cultivate creative and reproductive imagination, bringing it to such a level that in the digital era other media consumers felt themselves creators, competitors of professional mass media. The widespread fascination with blogging confirms this, although it is worth noting that the principle of turning to blogs, whether business companies or independent bloggers, is based on the economic factor, the desire to monetize media products while popularizing it. Nevertheless, the inclusion of an amateur producer in the information field of media products in mass terms led to the deconstruction of the media market significantly increased the fragmentation of the audience of professional mass media. Now a mixed model of media consumption prevails in Russia. In particular, Russians with higher and incomplete higher education turn to the Internet – 34%, and young people belong to the digital generation at all, since the share of Internet users in the 18‒24 age group is 66%, in the 25‒34 age group – 52%, and there are practically no active viewers among them – 0 and 1% respectively. Active viewers are mostly 70-year-olds and older – 43%, unemployed pensioners – 43% and villagers – 23%.²

In general, these statistics can be perceived as an indicator of a trend that has begun to develop, symbolizing the loss of the professional media industry of its priority positions. It is worth assuming that the mass development of artificial intelligence, Internet of things, virtual reality technologies, which are still being tested, but by 2030, as planned, will probably be fully mastered, will pave a more significant watershed between the media industry and the audience. And this trend is becoming a considerable problem for modern media, which raises the question of revising theoretical and practical approaches to creating media products attractive to society, developing new forms of interaction with the audience. Unresolved, however, there is still a question. The popularization of digital and Internet technologies, their development by the masses have taken place, the projected innovative technologies will be mastered equally massively, but has the entertainment industry, with which modern media structures identify themselves, become massively popular “for the mind and feelings”, has the Dream Society taken place?

Creative industries requires the media industry

The projection of the strategic development of the media industry and other cultural industries is actually formulated in the Concept of the development of creative industries and mechanisms for their state support in large and largest urban agglomerations until 2030.³ This important document, which provides an assessment of both the current state of the segment of production of goods and services of creative and cultural purposes, and substantiates their economic potential in the national GDP, formulates mechanisms for the further development of creative industries and creative entrepreneurship, is aimed primarily at increasing the role and functional significance of “human capital and creative work”, as well as the structural and organizational formation of the humanitarian sector in the national digital (creative) economy.

In addition, this institutional segment includes an extremely wide range of both specialized cultural institutions, including education, and production. It includes: a) industries based on the use of historical and cultural heritage – folk arts and crafts, museum activities; b) industries based on art – theater, music, cinema, animation, painting, gallery activities and others; c) modern media and digital content production – film, video, audio, animation production, data processing and software development, virtual and augmented reality, computer and video games, blogging, print industry, mass media, advertising, etc.; d) applied creative industries – architecture, industrial design, fashion industry, gastronomic industry, etc. In general, it is planned to create creative and creative institutional clusters and turn them into a full-fledged ecosystem, where not only the creation of creative and creative potential of competitive ideas for the cultural development of the country's population is cultivated, including the accumulation of knowledge and training of creative personnel, but also there are mechanisms of economic, production and technological plan for the implementation of new media products.

Such a clearly formulated strategic perspective for the development of creative industries requires the media industry, which is part of the digital paradigm, to pay increased attention to the content and form of the media products produced. Currently, the system of Telegram channels prevails in the media market, where information in verbal, visual, audiovisual forms, being updated in high-speed mode, is focused mainly on facts and events. But this is not enough for the formation of reproductive and divergent thinking in a social environment. Creators in the media industry should have broad knowledge of the humanities and technology profile, be able to design a digital future, create original interpretations of aesthetically attractive media stories, which reflect vital meanings in figurative and symbolic form, capable of arousing interest in media products among both age and youth audiences.

The Russian philosopher, cultural critic, and literary critic M.M. Bakhtin wrote about the organicity and integrity of the connection between content and form, emphasizing that “...content is a necessary constitutive moment of an aesthetic object, an artistic form is correlative to it, which has no meaning at all outside of this correlation”. At the same time, the author explains his position by saying that “...every artist in his work, if it is significant and serious, is like the first artist, he directly has to take an aesthetic position in relation to the non-aesthetic reality of knowledge and action, at least within his purely personal ethical and biographical experience” (Bakhtin, 1975, p. 32, 36). Despite the fact that M.M. Bakhtin wrote about fiction, his assessment of the criteria for an approach to a creative work is quite correlated with media production and screen communications.

A thorough analysis of postmodernism as a special space in the artistic and aesthetic culture of the last third of the 20th – beginning of the 21st century, characterized by “pervasive irony in relation to both classical tradition and modern searches in the field of art practices, aesthetic theory”, is given in his article “Postmodernism in aesthetics” by a well-known scientist, Doctor of Philosophy N. Mankovskaya. The work reveals not only the basic principles of postmodernism (deconstruction, intertextuality, simulation, schizoanalysis, rhizomatics, irony), but also examines this direction in art in relation to painting, architecture, cinema, theater, dance, music, literature. In other words, in this theoretical context, the main creative industries are considered. Interesting in this regard is the interpretation of Russian postmodernism, which “is inherent in the domestic version of deconstruction – counterfactuality, the tendency to legitimize imaginary discourses, pseudo-biographical, equalization in the status of art and art criticism, resulting in attempts to create a fantasy metaculture” (Mankovskaya, 2018, p. 226). The options for creating a new mythology are combined with the frankly commercial, mass-cultural tendency of merging postmodern experiments with entertainment, plot, and rigid genre. Inspired by the example of Quentin Tarantino, domestic postmodernism increasingly claims the status of “charming waste paper”, light and clever “pulp fiction” And this conclusion is difficult to dispute.

Conclusion

The approach of a digital society, which has yet to be created, the active development of innovative technologies, such as artificial intelligence, VR technologies, Internet of Things, Data Journalism, quantum technologies, robotics, human-machine hybridization, indicate that the modern world is becoming noticeably more complicated, acquiring a network form of communicative interaction, and given by technology the vector of development undoubtedly requires the development of a productive algorithm of actions primarily for the social system. The media industry, as the most important institutional system with whose help “society knows itself” (UNESCO) can provide significant support in this direction. And this is possible, but on condition that modern media structures are really transformed into creative industries, and the media products distributed by them will acquire content, emotionality and aestheticization of media forms based on scientific knowledge.

 

_{¹ Digital 2023 July Global Digital Statshot Report. Retrieved July 1, 2023, from https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2023-july-global-statshot}

_{² Media Consumption Trends. Retrieved April 3, 2023, from https://wciom.ru/analytical-reviews/analiticheskii-obzor/trendy-mediapotreblenija-2022}

_{³ Concept Development of Creative (creative) Industries and Mechanisms Implementation of their State Support in Large and the Largest Urban Agglomerations until 2030. Retrieved April 3, 2023, from https://docs.cntd.ru/document/608746222}

About the authors

Svetlana L. Urazova

Russian State University of Cinematography named after S. Gerasimov; Media Industry Academy

Author for correspondence.
Email: svetlana.urazova@gmail.com
ORCID iD: 0000-0003-2264-2859

Doctor of Philology, Associate Professor, Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal “Vestnik VGIK”, Professor of the Film Studies Department, Russian State University of Cinematography named after S. Gerasimov; Head of the Department (Research Sector), Professor of the Journalism Department, Media Industry Academy

3 Vilgelma Pika St, Moscow, 129226, Russian Federation; 105 Oktyabrskaya St, bldg 2, Moscow, 127521, Russian Federation

References