Grard Imbert analyzes the ability of television to deform the reality

Beyond the trivial, television is half of enormous symbolic weight, where our ghosts and that feeds back the collective imagination. Faced with the shortfall of reality TV creates its own reality, and does so transforming it into spectacle: the processor is television, with that ability that has the means to distort the reality until you get to the grotesque.

This is the basis on which Gerard Imbert, professor of Audiovisual Communication at the University Carlos III de Madrid, analyzes the recent evolution of television in his book 'The transformer television. Postelevisin social and imaginary '(Ctedra. Sign and Image).

Imbert argues television has taken an important turning point in the last two decades. Beyond its claim to report on the world and play the reality has become a major producer of imaginary machine.

The book consists of two parts: first, 'The games from reality', focuses on how television is moving away from its information function and becomes more didactic and playful, using the social reality as a pretext for create a reality 'sui ', halfway between reality and fiction and the most vivid example is staged in the formats of television (' Big Brother ',' Hotel Glam ',' Pop Idol'...).

This section also refers to it calls "television interventionist", namely that not only listens, as in 'talk show'-advised but even half in conflicts or send advisers, as in 'Supernany', 'SOS teenager' and 'adjustment accounts.

Professor of Audiovisual Communication and author of books including 'The zoo visual' (Gedisa), 'The temptation of suicide' (Tecnos) or 'Cultures of War', (Chair) warns of some of the dangers that lurk to the medium, as is the tendency to strain to reach the grotesque, as' freak ', which consists of the' 'of reality. In an inflation of the narrative forms that crystallizes in 'Martian Chronicles'. Program ending Imbert enshrining what qualifies as a 'culture of messing around'.

The second part, 'The games with reality' explores the passage produced by the television, which staged the subject, gives him the opportunity to project themselves on a standby at the game on television, to identify with multiple roles . This is far from reality and is close to the model of role-playing.

The author claims the imperative of the show, with the subsequent contamination of the model for information that leads to 'infotainment', the of reality (in four years the events have TRIPICE its presence in the news), stresses the back of conversational model ( 'this show', 'reality show') and start-show speech, warning of the emergence of hybrid formats, which blend reality and fiction, where he was playful blurs the boundaries between real and imaginary, and it concerned about competition from new forms of today, with their peculiar ways of staging his informative and the intimate, with the subsequent of the boundary between public and private.

A section of the book is really inspiring reading Imbert performs the treatment of death on television. In fiction, through series like 'CSI,' 'Genesis' and' A Six Feet Under, and in real terms, with the deaths of the bullfighter Paquirri, Pope John Paul? II and the folk singers and Rocio Jurado Roco Drcal.

The book, but not easy to read, it is extremely interesting and instructive to understand the evolution of television and its role in the construction of identities and of the collective imagination.