What the lockdown taught us in terms of remediation #ByAnaMilán

In recent decades there has been an excessive media advance, where technological evolution has taken a relevant role in the development of new media and ways of communicating and creating. This has generated much debate about what was going to happen with media such as radio or television, in the face of the arrival of the Internet and the “boom” of social networks that we live in this era.

The obsolescence of the old media has been assumed in the face of the emergence of new media, and some critics remain captivated by the modernist “myth of the new”, assuming that digital technologies must divorce themselves from earlier media for a new set of aesthetic and cultural principles. However, in 1999, David Bolter and Richard Grusin found the way in which the old and new media could coexist, even contributing to each other: through remediation.

Remediation allow to refashion the old media to answer to the challenges of new media and thus to implement the new principles of creation of the digital era, at the same time that the digital technologies might adapt and reinterpret what has been done before in order to engage with the new audiences and ways of consuming.

Undoubtedly, 2020 has taught us a lesson in terms of remediation. The advent of COVID-19 and the confinement we were subjected to because of the pandemic forced us to find new ways to create within the framework of constraints we had. And this applied to the new creators and inhabitants of the new technology, but also to the old media that had to find a way to adapt themselves to the situation and to the changes that society was resorting to in order to stay connected. Musicians found the way to reach their audiences through improvised concerts at home, several museums found the way to reach their public making their galleries available through screens, and video games became a meeting place for friends and strangers. Therefore, hyper-connectivity began to gain great importance and the cultural and creative began to be in everyone's hands.

Moreover, new forms of online and home-based entertainment emerged to lifts people’s spirits. Somehow, we needed to feel there was someone for us. Also for creators, feel supported was something that kept them active and excited about what they were doing. The Ana Milan “phenomenon” arose precisely from the actress’s eagerness to make people feel accompanied. She wanted to contribute in some way to this era of forced and necessary digital creativity to cope, and as she said, keeping company is something she was good at.

The methodology was simple, she met every evening at 6pm with her followers through Instagram Live. The idea was to have a conversation and let improvisation flow. That fresh interaction with their followers led her to share plenty of anecdotes, which immediately went viral also on Twitter. At the end, Ana became the friend we needed to make us laugh during those difficult times.

Due to her popularity, the producer and editorial director Sonia Martínez proposed to make a series including all those anecdotes she shared. That is how Atresmedia began to produce #ByAnaMilán, a fiction comedy based on real events, including what she shared through Instagram Live but most importantly, what people liked and spread the most.

From a remediation point of view, this decision to adapt what was successful in social networks and trying to bring it to filming, to a television format, might mean refashioning the old media to the new era. That is, Atresmedia possibly tried to implement those elements believing they would work this time too. However, circumstances were no longer the same. What people were most interested in during the quarantine was the truth and freshness she showed and the opportunity they had to participate in that conversation, which were completely deleted at the point where the script sets the narrative of the series.

This is not to say that the series was unsuccessful, far from it. The people who follow Ana watched the series with the same enthusiasm as they would watch a real friend on television. But it is true that in terms of remediation, they could have gone further. Perhaps they could have gone for intercreativity, allowing people to participate in some way in the process of creating the series or the script itself. In this way they would have succeeded in integrating digital technologies into old media, allowing interaction, a shared narrativity and thus, a bigger immersion in the content.