Part B2: The scientific proposal (max. 15 pages, excluding Ethical Issues Table and Annex)
Section a. State-of-the-art and objectives
” I know no great work of art in all of world culture that would be not be linked to an ethical ideal, that is based on some other motives such as on the dark aspects of life. There are some talented works of such a nature, but no masterpieces”, Andrei Tarkovsky (Lipkov 1988: 74-80)In this analysis I intend to apply an interdisciplinary and qualitatively comparative approach between the West and other areas of influence in the World, in order to research the most important ethical and moral values (anthropological, social, cultural, political, etc.) that may result from the most successful movies and global TV series in these early years of the 21st century. I pretend to draw out an innovative structure that can be used as a base for detailing the most common and important ethical and moral values that can be deduced from these films and TV series with global success. So, for this research I propose a neologism that might encompass all the elements that I mobilise: gloethics. The ultimate goal is to see how Western values, highly influenced by those of Christianity (and Humanism, and Democracy), are or not still prevalent in the World. Also, how another set of values from Eastern cultural and religious areas are beginning to change our vision of a globalized World. In this sense, I focus on the ability of these cultures to export an increasingly number of powerful cultural products that inherently carry a series of intrinsic values. These eastern values, at the same time, not always keep the traditional values normally awarded in the West to the Oriental cultures. With my research project there are some questions that I intend to answer: Is there a global ethics (gloethics) that can be deduced form successful films and TV series? Is globalisation shaping an audience that can share the same set of values, or, on the contrary, this phenomenon is showing an irreconcilable difference in this sense? If, as a matter of fact, there exists such a thing like gloethics, how are its values, do they suppose a forward movement in the history of human ethics, or, in the contrary, it takes the ethics to a kind of level zero agreement? To answer this, first, I will pay attention to the phenomenon of globalisation –this is, in fact, the first research hub of my project. It is quite a big research area as it includes aspects from economics, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, etc. Globalisation has been studied for centuries if we agree that it really begins, in a way, with the discovery of America in 1492; but in some way it is also related to Marco Polo’s expeditions to the Far East in the late 13th century, or even earlier, to the Roman Empire, or to the Neolithic Age. But it is actually in the late 20th century when globalisation starts to offer an intense scientific production about it, fuelled by advances in human connectivity (transport and telecommunications) and greater freedom in the movement of people and the spread of ICT, but not implying always the physical movement of the people if we consider the use of the Internet. The vast majority of scholarly energy in the field of globalisation has been devoted to economics and cultural studies. However, from the beginning of the spread of these studies, we can find some significant examples following less well-trodden paths, as Marshall McLuhan, who in 1989 popularized the term Global Village suggesting that globalisation would lead to a world where people would become more integrated and aware of common interests on a shared humanity. McLuhan stated that we are what we see, somehow, the representational world that is built through informal education –on which films/TV series are quite important− has a primary role in our future to understand and interpret the world and the values that we hold to life in. So, we life in a representational world that operates by strengthening and articulating how we see and understand reality and the values that are used for comprehend it. The world we build in our minds not only of formal education but above all, through informal education, which cannot be seen or is not instructed in the walls of a school. Explicit messages taught in formal education are visible and interpretable; we are able to decode it, according to the guidelines established in the school and the most common values. But, what about the world of education that is not seen? In this regard, UNESCO (1994) defines ” informal education” –of which movies and TV series as part of− like: ” All free knowledge and spontaneously acquired from individuals, institutions, mass media, print media, traditions, customs, social behaviours and other unstructured”. Citizenship and the values that support it is in limbo when no institution handles the non-visible messages, the contents that people doesn’t know to read deeply (images), and the artificial world that media construct. It is known that school-age student spends more hours in contact with the media, and digital technologies and mobile telephony than with the school and that the media are interacting with each other and strengthen their own values. With the mass media and globalisation appeared a new form of socialization in which individuals no longer related only directly to their peers, but through technological means. For the first time aroused the opportunity to influence socialization processes at high scale as few issuers could transmit massive messages to a receiver. But there are some aspects in this process of globalisation related to the media that need to be more thought, like those pointed out by a prominent number of Latin American thinkers including Antonio Pasquali, Luis Ramiro Beltrán, Fernando Reyes Matta, and Mario Kaplun. In addition, Dallas Smythe, Herbert Schiller, Oliver Boyd-Barrett, and Armand Mattelart have been instrumental to the development of this theory (Tomlinson, 1997). Also, authors of the Frankfurt School such as Adorno and Horkheimer who coined concepts like cultural industries, pointing to the negative fact that culture no longer had a popular origin, but came from the factory as one more industry. Arise then, here, concepts as necolonialism, through the production images factory and the cultural messages production from Hollywood, lest we forget, it is one the basis of our research project, promote very specific values that have been spreading worldwide and will spread beyond the ” American Way of Life”. In my project I do not start from the idea that this is exclusively negative, because, among other things, between them we find freedom, democratic values, and so on. In fact, this whole media and interpellation to viewers structure from different cultures is much more complex when you consider that the media −known as the Fourth State− are currently very profitable companies that are used as a powerful tool for educate, re-educate and socialize citizens in both capitalist and other societies that now have also a great influence (such as China). In addition, through advertising and business modeling, these companies increase profitability of other media related businesses. This is evident, for example, in the advertising blocks inserted in the TV series. To all of this is added a tension between what for many has been a rapid change and, to some extent, an imposed one. And here is where an statesman from Europe like Jacques Delors presents what he has called the principal stresses they will be faced in the 21st century: The tension between the global and the local; the tension between the universal and the singular; the tension between tradition and modernity; the tension between long term and short term; the tension between the need for competition and concern for equal opportunities; the tension between the extraordinary expansion of knowledge and the capacity to assimilate of the human being; finally, the tension between the material and the spiritual (1996). Some other shadows comes from the academia itself because, as Daniele Conversi (2010) stated, in globalisation studies there has been a disinclination to regard Americanisation as being central to the globalising process. I agree with her in that, if studied in tandem, we can arrive to a better conceptualization of the phenomenon, above all, in its cultural sphere. That’s why I propose a comparative analysis between West and the other areas, as globalisation from 20th century is, first of all, a process of westernization. Besides, cinema, as a western invent, is one of the best cues to date a good start for this phenomenon in its modern shape. Anyway, I focus my research in the 21st century, not only to enclose my project, but because in this century this phenomenon has suffered an acceleration process, and it is the century where really it effects are beginning to be important as they are shaping a cosmopolitan citizen. Nowadays, we can find approaches related to mine in Manfred B. Steger when he talks about how social imaginaries shows ” dependent narratives, visual prototypes, metaphors and conceptual framings. […] capable of facilitating collective fantasies and speculative reflections, they should not be dismissed as phantasms or mental fabrications” (2009: 7). In this sense, those narratives come, in a great degree, from the imaginaries offered by our object of research; and, at the same time, those collective fantasies and speculative reflections refer also to the ethical values –and to gloethics. This neologism I propose, gloethics, can be tracked in some way to different projects, as the Institute for Global Ethics (IGE), founded in 1990 in the USA, a ” non-profit organization dedicated to promoting ethical action in a global context” with the challenge ” to explore the global common ground of values, elevate awareness of ethics, provide practical tools for making ethical decisions, and encourage moral actions based on those decisions”; or to the Globethics. net, founded in 2009 in Geneva (Switzerland) as ” a global network […] interested in various fields of applied ethics. It offers access to a large number of resources on ethics”. In any case, my neologism only keeps some relation to their ethical strategy; but gloethics, wants to be a concept where ethics is, above all, a theoretical one trying to define and relate different spheres: the global and the ethics in relation to audiovisual media. Nowadays, globalisation is usually understood as the process ” that encompasses the causes, course, and consequences of transnational and transcultural integration of human and non-human activities.” (Al-Rodhan, Nayef R. F. and Gérard Stoudmann, 2006). Also as ” all those processes by which the peoples of the world are incorporated into a single world society” (Albrow, Martin and Elizabeth King, 1990: 8). Globalisation, in many cases, implies change and progress. In many others, its effects are not so positive as it can imply loss of native culture and values, as the term, globalisation, suggests that the audience constitute a vast sea of passive, undifferentiated individuals. The most advanced societies, such as Europe, do not usually have fear of it, as Philip Gordon stated in 2004 that ” a clear majority of Europeans believe that globalization can enrich their lives, while believing the European Union can help them take advantage of globalization’s benefits while shielding them from its negative effects”. To overtake this possible dichotomy, I propose to apply interdisciplinary efforts, for example, with philosophical studies and anthropological approaches about it. As in many other fields of humanistic knowledge, we can often perceive a kind of extremism. In this sense, in the globalisation studies these positions can be summarized in those integrated, that firmly believe in the goodness of globalization and its benefits for economic growth and human society in general; and those apocalyptic, as Noam Chomsky or the wide range of social movements formed by activists from different political positions from the late 20th century, for example, those converging in the social criticism to the so-named pensée unique, and who believe that globalisation perpetuates social inequality and ethnocentric hegemonism. Therefore, the phenomenon of globalisation shows quite a broad area of research and with a lot of tradition. A 2005 UNESCO report showed that cultural exchange is becoming more frequent from Eastern Asia, but Western countries are still the main exporters of cultural goods. In 2002, China was the third largest exporter of cultural goods, after the UK and US. Between 1994 and 2002, both North America’s and the European Union’s shares of cultural exports declined, while Asia’s cultural exports grew to surpass North America. From this fact, I think the comparative aspect of my research is justified. In this sense, my research will avoid falling into what the thinker Edward Said called Orientalism, i. e., the Western imaginary construction from which were awarded a number of special features, –mystery, exotic places, wealth, etc.– many of which had to do also with a certain set of values –respect for elders and family ties, preponderance of group values against individualism, etc. Thus, following the general goal I’ve underlined, another objective of my research is to ascertain what are the predominant values that can be deduced from the movies and most successful TV series in the Eastern most influential countries, both those produced there as those imported from the West. At the same time, I will check if the values of Western films and TV series are experienced in the same way or not, i. e., I will comparatively analyse how these values are assimilated and transformed into both types of audience. The scientific area that analyse the effects of the media in the audience have usually focused in psychological approaches that analyse if there is a direct causal link between violence in movies, TV series and programmes (and video games), and violent real-life crime. It is often argued that such media content exerts an overwhelmingly negative effect on the audience. Sociological approaches has also been important as sociologists usually have argued that media content can have a direct effect upon their audiences and trigger particular social responses in terms of behaviour and attitudes. In the 20th century, some early Marxist commentators, as those from to the Frankfurt School –Herbert Marcuse (1964)–, believed that the media transmitted some values related to the mass culture which influenced directly the behaviour of the population making them more vulnerable to ruling class propaganda. This idea involves the use of influence by the owners of the media and cultural producers (as those of film/TV Series), and sufficient resources to impose their own will and judgment on the audience. It is a mechanism, reinforcing good attitudes, or from possibility of changing attitudes and behaviours, which may even affect the values and collective beliefs, small groups or large (nations). Although the processes of social and cultural influence have close relations with the effective exercise of power, they are characterized by the absence of coercion and even threat. Historically, the researches in this area can be summarized in 3 theories to describe the influence of mass media: 1) The Limited-effects Theory states that people would choose the media they use according to their values so, its influence would be limited; 2) The Class-dominant Theory states that the media would reflect the view of a controlling elite, which also owns the media; 3) The Culturalist Theory researchers (1980s and 1990s) combines the other two theories and maintains that the audience interact with media to create their own meanings out of the images and messages they receive, playing, therefore, an active, rather than passive role in relation to the media. At the end of the 20th century, J. R. Finnegan Jr. and K. Viswanath (1997: 324) proposed 3 main effects of the media: 1) The Knowledge Gap that would explain the media influences knowledge gaps due to various factors (appealing of the content, accessibility and desirability of channels information, and amount of social conflict and diversity in an specific community); 2) Agenda Setting or how people are influence in the way they think about issues due to the selective nature of what media choose for public consumption –this effect is related to the class-dominant theory: 3) Cultivation of Perceptions or the extent to which media exposure shapes audience perceptions over time, often based on socioeconomic factors. From this last effect, being prolonged exposed to, let’s say, violent TV or movie, might affect the audience to the extent where they actively think community violence is a problem, or alternatively find it justifiable. In this sense, my approach would be an active audience one, i. e., that media audiences are not manipulated or directly influenced by the media. Rather, they adopt a particular opinion, attitude and way of behaving after their experience with the movies/TV series, and not always in a conscious way. The audience is, therefore, not passive, but active. In this sense, my hypothesis predicts that these movies/TV series of global success are shaping a kind of audience at world level, since the origins of cinema, and intensified in the 50s with the birth of the TV –and, above all, with the appearance of Internet and the virtual communities online. The difference between the mass media to which I attend (film and TV) and the recent online media is that in the former are still valid the first studies on the influence of the media –with the nuances that I have made–, while in the latter to talk about global ethics becomes more complicated, mainly due to audience fragmentation and consumption patterns, not so centralized on an only screen, and with consumption habits much less formalized. The film and TV series spectator still resembles the original audience of the mass media of the 20th century in that he consumes similar structured stories and narratives which extend more or less in time, and in the fact that they know that those stories are shared by millions of viewers around the world –in on-line communities, meanwhile, all of this has changed deeply, but this is subject to further investigation. In this sense, our hypothesis plays with the idea that the biggest novelty between the classic spectator and the current one is that perhaps the latter is now even more aware that he/she is part of a global community that shares the same cosmopolitan tastes, at least in those referred to this type of audiovisual products and, from that, but in a deeply level, they share a same set of ethical and moral values that are integrated in their behavior in positives and/or negative ways depending on the culture, the specific film/TV series, etc. We have many examples from Oscar winning films and the cultural influence these exert from that moment, until global phenomena like the TV series Lost (Jeffrey Lieber, JJ Abrams and Damon Lindelof, ABC, 2004), with a final episode that was aired simultaneously in 9 countries, and which occupied the front pages of newspapers by the suspense created globally about their uncertain ending and that, in a very interesting way for my research, resurrected the interest of late 20th century in New Age religions, etc. What matters to me at this point is to note that the study of the influence of the mass media, including film and TV, has grown greatly in recent decades; but not with the same intensity when researching about the values that can be inferred from them. So, my project can also be a genuine contribution to this research area. This is the ground of my research; but where I can mainly apply my experience, both professional and academic background, is in the audio-visual textual analysis of these successful TV series and movies, always with the focus placed on highlighting the values that predominates in those cultural objects and how these values are spread in different societies and cultures around the globe. In this sense, the second research hub of my research is related to these special and influential audio-visual texts from where the background of my project is composed: movies and TV series with global success. The reason is logical as my research focuses on some special effects of globalization. So, I give my efforts to a kind of cultural products that have a great influence in globalisation, i. e., to movies and TV series that are important in this process as they have a global success in various of the geographical areas of influence that I will detail soon. The selection criteria, as to the movies, will be the box-shared office in the different proposed areas, and prizes at international Category A (as FIAPF) film festivals (Berlin, Cannes, El Cairo, Goa, Karlovy Vary Mar del Plata, Montreal, Moscow, Locarno, San Sebastian, Shanghai, Tokyo, Venice and Warsaw), the Oscars, Golden Globe Awards (also for TV), the European Film Awards (European Film Academy), Asian Film Awards (Hong Kong International Film Festival Society); and as for the TV series, the debut in prime-time slots on national TV networks, digital platforms and open TV, and awards at TV series festivals (Emmy, BAFTA and others). Values are a handful of constructs that bridge the social sciences. They have been defined narrowly in terms of object attractiveness, broadly as abstract principles guiding social life, and between these extremes, as stable preferences that individuals hold in relation to specific conditions of living (Becker and. McClintock, 1967). Value indicates the regard for an object, situation or attitude, which for some reason is esteemed or prized by the value holder. Ethical value can be defined as standard for norm of conduct derived from the way in which we wish others to view or treat us (Chilana and Dewana, 1998). Values are defined as enduring preferences for a particular mode of behavior or end state over the opposite mode of behavior or end state. The theory assumes that values are ordered hierarchically. Values relate to broad tendencies rather than prescriptions for action in a specific context (Hofstede, 1998); i. e., they tend to function more like principles than concrete rules. Human beings develop values as a result of their education, individual personality, and personal experiences, so that a person’s values will be predisposed by such factors as age, gender, culture, and religion (Id.)). Some consider values to be almost entirely affective (Id.), while others conceptualize them as containing both affective and cognitive components (Rokeach, 1973). As Felton, Dimnik and Bay stated, values have been classified in a number of ways, as those of Milton Rokeach, who developed the Rokeach Value Survery (RVS), which consists of two sets of values, with each set containing 18 individual values. One set, named terminal values, refers to desirable end-states of existence. These are goals that a person might like to achieve during his or her lifetime. The other set, called instrumental values, refers to preferable modes of behaviour, or means of achieving the terminals. For example, values can be intrinsic, such as ” happiness”, or extrinsic, such as ” success”. The most frequently cited classification system is still that of Rokeach (1973). According to this topology, values that relate to modes of behavior, such as ” kindness” or ” courage”, are called instrumental values, whereas values that refer to end states, such as ” family security” or ” a world of beauty” are terminal values. Rokeach (1973) argues that certain basic values are universal, and these are the values that interest me, and how they are evolving trough film and TV series. Culture and other influences determine the hierarchy of the values, rather than their occurrence. Clearly, not all values relate to ethical decision making. Some suggest that instrumental values that relate to how one deals with others are ethical in nature, while other values are more competency related (Fritzsche, 1995; Rokeach, 1973). For example, ” intelligence” and ” ambition” are competency values, while ” helpfulness” and ” kindness” are values that have moral content. Similarly, terminal values may be social or personal. Thus, for example, ” self-respect” is a terminal value that is personal, while ” a world at peace” is more social in nature. However, researchers sometimes disagree as to whether certain values relate to ethics, and no consensus has yet been reached on how values map into ethical behavior (Allen et al., 2005). For example, Eaton and Giacomino (2000) classify ” self-respect” as a personal value because its focus is on self rather than other, whereas Fritzsche (1995) argues that self-respect relates to ethics, since one must have self-respect in order to act ethically. Rokeach (1973) suggests that we can infer values from observations of actions (Felton et al., 2008: 220). As RVS fails in some aspects (ambiguity when ranking, more certainty in the extremes, etc.), it will be also interesting to attend to Schwartz theories about universal values −that is still used in the European Social Survey− as ” conceptions of the desirable that influence the way people select action and evaluate events” (1987: 550), hypothesising that universal values would relate to three different types of human needs: biological, social co-ordination, and those related to the welfare and survival of groups. One of the last efforts to categorize the ethical values comes from the philosophy field. Robert S. Hartman has proposed the Science of Value (1967) through the concept of systematic value, an addition to the traditional Rokeach’s intrinsic and extrinsic values. The systematic is related to how people value, i. e., to the conceptual constructs or cognitive scripts from people minds; for example, ideals, norms, standards, rules, etc.; creating the Hartman Value Inventory. I will have to take in mind all of these theories about the values, but the most important for me is to find out if we can really talk about universal values, the role of films/TV series with global success in its existence, and how these values –be universal or not− are understood comparatively between East and West. We can summarize the objectives of my research in the following points:- To form a team given the high level of work from the documentation process and, above all, the analysis of the films and TV series. Depending on this, my contingency plan would include to hire another student to support the group.- List of the most important ethical and moral values to be drawn from the TV series and popular movies that can be global and might be leading to a new concept that I call gloethics.- List of films and TV series that can be considered of global success, with the following criteria:• Awards from festivals of category A and other of reference, both film and TV.• Box office figures in a global level.• Between 2000 and 2018 (the last year of the project).• Total number of countries in which they premiere.• As for the series, we also will consider their presence in prime time slots.• 5 series and five movies a year.• For each film a research card or sheet: summary or facts (artistic and technical data), broad synopsis, narrative conflicts and selection of representative scenes from where can be deduced the most important values, basic description of aesthetics and staging (cinematography and mise en scène), and how these relate to narrative structure. We’ll use the same method for the TV series, but two cards per series (initial and final chapters), and a special section summarizing the entire series.- Creation of a Website: with basic bibliography, list of films/TV series, audio-visual clips, video interviews, comprehensive final report, documentation and analysis of practical examples for teachers of pre-university levels in order that they can implement it with their students, blog and forum, Decalogue and recommendations for educators on how to represent and manage more humane and democratic values in audiovisual texts, for audiovisual producers and, especially, political and leadership positions in education and social issues, etc.- Advisory Board of international scholars from the different areas involved (globalisation, film/TV analysis, comparative studies, ethical values) will monitor the project on a yearly basis.- Panels about the subject of my research in International Conferences, Congresses and international film/TV festivals. Also, we will arrange public presentations for a wider audience (parents, teachers, teenagers, etc.).- Production of a pilot for TV Series related to the subject of the project and targeted to a wide audience –not only academics. The idea is, when the pilot is finished, to promote it between producers and TV channels with prestige in Spain and in Europe in order to transform it in a series. Here we need a contingency plan, since the realization of a pilot is a complicated task –as I know from my previous professional experience. In this sense, if ultimately fails, at least we would like to produce series project that includes a script for the pilot. This series project would be, then, the one that we would promote between producers and TV’s channels. Also, in this contingency plan, or as an asset, it would be interesting to apply, starting from this series project, to some of the Media Programme funding that is used by European Union to support financially the development, distribution and promotion of audio-visual industries.- International Observatory: this is a more long-term objective in order to analyse, from year 2019 on, the presence of ethical values in the TV series and movies with global success.
Section b. Methodology
I have already described two of the research hubs of my project (gloethics, and influence of the films/TV series with global success). Now, I will describe the methodology and the three other research hubs that can be inferred from the title of my project: The third research hub of my project will be to analyse which successful films and TV Series can we consider global and why. From this fact, the next step will be to analyse if these audiovisual products are shaping a particular shared ethics around the world, and the consequences of this phenomenon. Besides, I will have to face up to how the cultural globalisation affects the different publics and audiences, and our conception of ethics and morality. This project aims at interdisciplinary and qualitatively comparative analysis between the Eastern and Western set of values (anthropological, ethical, moral, beliefs, etc.) that can be inferred from global successful TV series and films in the 21st century. Some will be values related to the increasingly complexity of the evolution of human culture, for example, those brought by the cultural globalisation. Therefore, from this it follows the first methodological aspect of my project, meaning that it is a qualitative research approach –in the sense that I pay more attention to an in-depth analysis of the results. The reason for this stems from the special characteristics of the object of study which, lest we forget, has to do with some of the most sophisticated expression forms of human beings, such as art and audiovisual entertainment, leading, among other effects (such as a particular aesthetic experience) to some ethical consequences that I believe that have not been tested yet with enough depth in its global aspect, and that can be deduced from the experience from the different publics and audiences of the most influential stories and narratives worldwide nowadays. The fourth research hub is related to how I am going to analyse the values that can be deduced from those audiovisual products. The methodology that I intend to apply is an interdisciplinary one (aesthetics, anthropology, cultural studies, history of the media, philosophy, psychoanalysis, textual analysis and visual studies). But the main tool will be Textual Analysis. In fact, this is one of the most genuine aspects that I put in the research, as this analytical tool is not usually used in these kinds of researches. I will try to apply it to my research following three levels: 1st) Development of the methodological tool for audiovisual and narrative analysis that can be applied to any TV series or movie with global success; 2nd) Analysis of the global ethical values prevailing in those audiovisual texts (intuitively or not); 3rd) Finally, appropriateness, in the light of the phenomenon of globalisation, of talking about different values between East and West. Textual Analysis is a methodology widely recognised and applied, that is related to Semiotics, but which I intend to apply in a more broader and genuine way. It is a kind of content analysis approach, which enables me to include large amounts of textual information for systematically identifying its properties by locating the more important structures and strategies of its communication and emotional content. Such amounts of textual information will be categorised, providing me, at the end, a meaningful reading of the corpus. To research with that amount of data, my hypothesis to depart from is that popular and global successful movies and TV series are shaping an intercultural global shared set of ethical values that needs to be evaluated to the light of the globalisation. I think this phenomenon is one of the most important to assess the 21st century general ethics given the influence of these successful global stories and narratives. From a historical perspective, this phenomenon began to take shape originally from the spread of cinema at the end of the 19th century, reaching a peak with Classical Hollywood Cinema (Golden Age), beginning in the late 1920s and till the early 1960s. But if we talk about ethical matters, it is interesting to note that the cinema’s appearance as a massive media coincided with an important philosophical event: Friedrich Nietzsche writes The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen, 1883-1985) where Nietzsche states that ” God is dead” –reintroducing a sentence from Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes, 1807). Nietzsche is also known for being the first bestselling philosopher in History, what should already take us to think about the relation of global phenomena with human ethics. What is important to me is that the born of the first global media happened in that culture medium –that was also preceded by Marquis de Sade and Comte de Lautréamont, Romanticism, etc. That is, born in the first civilisation that had written the possibility of living without Gods, only with a civil ethics –or not ethics at all: this meant a totally new event if the History of our civilisation. In this sense, the so-called ” Hollywood dream factory” has been the only new myth structure that has appeared in the 20th century –after the dead of God. From this starting point, this mythological corpus has been gradually weakening by means of the spectacularity from the appearance of television and its influence in the stories and narratives that this new media had in cinema. I am referring to the general weakening of stories and narratives caused by the inflation of elements of the production, staging (mise en scène) and cinematography switched off from the former. Before becoming a researcher, I worked for TV production and programming during seven years in different Pay TV channels in Spain. Then, when I was able finish my dissertation, I left the profession and turned into applying this methodology to find out the deep sense of exemplar movies from Cinema History. Now, I want to give a new turn, starting from that background, to follow another path in order to look more deeply in how these audio-visual texts affects the spectators in the way they shape their ethical values. For this it is important to understand how I apply the Textual Analysis. The most important is my conception of text: a sphere for the subject (individual) experience, one in which human subject itself is shaped, as if the texts were a kind of symbolic bricks of cultures and societies –so, anthropology and psychoanalysis are helping here to the semiotics. From this point, the initial idea of my research is that global film/TV series, be it consumed in theatres, on television or other means, is today a key to shape the subjectivity of individuals. Through the narrative experience that films/TV series offer, I don’t perceive the ethics values as abstract and distant entities to provide –through its embodiment in the characters and events of the story– but a specific manifestation of an intense emotional charge. From the Textual Analysis, it is worth to remember that in every experience of the text, the viewer does not always understand cognitively what is happening in the story, even at times when the ethical values that appear in movies/TV series are far from his ethical beliefs; but even in these contradictory times the viewer is concerned, shocked and excited. The explanation of this can be found in the fact that there are certain texts that provide a symbolic efficacy of the story, some of whose valences is likely the success between the audience, and the symbolic representation of the Real and the most important ethical values. It is a efficacy that is shown tied to the certainty with which the viewer recognises –in the story and through the process of identification– his own desire fighting with the Law. This experience is, at the same time, understood like one that can’t be only articulated as signification, setting out one of the Textual Analysis fundamental proposals: the opposition between ” understanding” and ” knowing”. In this sense, experience of texts would be something that can’t be transmitted in a communicative process, i. e., that can’t be ” understood”, but is a knowledge object. So, when we talk about values in our research, we are referring to how these appear in the experience of the spectator, and how this experience produce certain kind of effects in them and their society. Then, what I propose is a kind of analysis that takes account for human experience of language. But text shouldn’t run out in a semiotic object, and should not be reducible to the ambit of signification. i. e., semiotics is not enough. Beyond Semiotics and signification, emerges the text sense, and with it, the human subject of experience, alien to the semiotic sender and receiver figures which articulate themselves in the discourse through the game of their own differentiability. This human subject is part of the text as he creates and reads it. And so, to the extent that text cannot be exclusively limited to a sphere of signification, is so glaringly evidenced the need of a Textual Analysis that transcends the boundaries of the semiotic, in order to take charge of the aforementioned human experience of language. This is one of the main elements of my research that makes it original and relevant, as none has been done yet –so far I’ve come. In fact, this is the main reason of why I think that this methodology is consistent with the object of study I’ve proposed: TV series and films shape a certain audience, so it is important to research what ethic values can be deduced from these texts to see how these make up the ethics of 21st century viewers. Furthermore, to the extent that the signifier can appear in the text-decomposition process that we can verify in current success TV series discourse and movies, is in that decomposition where these discourses identifies what, invariably, constitutes one of its most productive tools for the building of the spectator gaze, an evidence definitely alien to sign and significant order, that is, a raw material which, as such, can manifest itself as decomposed. This methodology is, also, a narratological study to locate and describe the structure of stories, focusing on the journeys of the characters in conflict management, desires and tasks. So, the textual analysis also takes into account aspects of film writing and narrative structure –narratology. So, I pretend to draw out a basic structure of narrative film/TV series with global success from which to analyse any audiovisual text from any of these areas of influence. The ultimate goal is to see how Western values, highly influenced by the values of Christianity, are or not still prevalent in the World, and how another set of values from other cultural and religious areas like the Easterners are beginning to change our vision in a globalised World, but not from the aforementioned Orientalist perspective, but by the ability of its emerging economies to export an increasingly number of products –being the cultural more and more important– which often show greater symbolic strength than the Westerners, but that, however, don’t retain either the traditional values normally awarded to the Oriental cultures. Finally, the main objective is to analyse, from successful global TV series and films, which are the predominant values in our globalised World. The fifth and last research hub refers to the selection of countries in each of the zones of influence and which inclusion criterion will be their economic, cultural and political importance, and of course, those which has offered the most influential and developed cinematography and TV series production. I propose two basic areas of influence on this criterion. The first would be included in a macro zone of influence that has traditionally been called West, which would include two main areas: European Union (including Eastern Europe) and USA, and Latin America (including Caribbean); and a second macro zone area, the East (Middle, Far and Pacific, including India). I will only make reference to Africa indirectly as this area doesn’t offer global and influential TV series and movies. We will need to do several travels, by myself or with some of the team members, to these countries; also to universities and research centres related to the media and the ethics, and to film/TV festivals.
