Infotainment in screen arts: entertaining reality or an anthropological experiment?

The term "infotainment" (portmanteau word of information and entertainment) is usually defined as the complex of creative ways of presenting and "aestheticization" of information. Researchers and practicians judge its significant influence on screen arts in different ways with some of the marks being quite controversial. In the most traditional sense, infotainment is the way of representing information in entertaining manner, based on hedonistic function of media and addressing to the audience emotions. The scholar from Lithuania Arunas Augustinaitis qualifies infotainment as the "cultural hypertext of double virtuality"; practically claiming it is not a genre or a group of genres, but the predominant model of the modern media culture. We tend to accept this definition in reference to screen culture and look for examples both in modern documentaries and innovative Internet projects. Under the influence of Internet's virtual space new generation of genres is being born in documentary film today. They remind us more of the living organisms then traditional films. In many cases they don't even have the ending. Part of the infotainment in the process of formation of these organisms is vital. In this article such experimental projects as "REALNOST.com", "Norilsk. Ot pervogo litsa", online reality "Na ekrane" are being analyzed as examples. The creators have called some of these projects "anthropological experiments". "REALNOST.com" is the documentary series, shot by its various heroes, unordinary, motivated and passionate people "from the street", that were given the cameras and the task to shoot whatever and however they want, - and then edited by professional documentary filmmakers. Today the project is still developing and its final episode is not even being considered as an option. As for technotainment (portmanteau word of technology and entertainment), the question is whether it is necessary for the work of screen art of this kind to be informative or is it enough to play the part of entertaining technological experiment/experience? Looking for the answers we compare the technotainment approaches of two projects: the interactive documentary "Norilsk. Ot pervogo litsa" and the online reality "Na ekrane". While the first offers the audience self-controlled online-journey through the city, second show the public most intimate details of participants virtual life via screen share technology. Both of them, however, create the sense of "double reality" with the help of the "double virtuality" instruments.

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