Televisão e formação na era digital: um exame crítico das pretensões formativas do programa Salto para o futuro

Abstract

The sea of real-time images, the instant access to latest news and the contemporary demand that praises and requires the so-called positive social values pass by the exhausting and brutalized affirmation process of this established culture. Television, in this regard, can become a powerful vehicle of ideology exchange, due to its global reach. However, television could be an education tool, provided that its content and form are properly prepared to this end. Following these discussions, and guided by readings of texts by Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, we propose the analysis of the content of educational television program, transmitted by television and Internet, Salto para o Futuro (Leap into the Future, in Portuguese), on TV Escola (Ministry of Education), as well as the observation of technical changes, in other words, the way the information are structured and transmitted by this mean of communication, born as a result of the digital technology emergence. Analysis has demonstrated that there is Form predominance over Content since the analyzed episode articulates its messages via TV newscast format, which beforehand tends to ensure spectators adhesion by its serious aspect. Another important aspect comes from the presence of a discursive pattern in the messages: the hero specialist teacher cliché who in the future, by magically jumping over the historical and material contradictions in the present days, will save education by using technology. Finally, we conclude that the general format of the Salto Para o Futuro TV show (Leap into the Future, in Portuguese) does not allow the offer for explanatory information. However, through the radical change of its dynamics - disruption of the formal hierarchy by dialectic relation tension of the Formation concept - the program could envision an educational horizon: an aid to reveal the mechanisms that prevent the refusal and resistance of what is presented as if it were real.