Reflections on a professional training session at ESRA for camera operators (OPV).

Moving tables to shift perspectives: the story of a day where we browsed, photographed, and created together to question what technologies do to our ways of working and connecting.

Breaking the Frame

Arriving in a training room with a suitcase full of books, printed QR codes, compact and recent audiovisual equipment, and a few ideas in mind, is already setting a frame. But the first gesture of this day was to break that frame: moving the tables, gathering them in the center, creating a space where we could circulate, browse, sit differently. This reorganization of space was not trivial. It already contained everything that would unfold: an invitation to step out of habitual postures and enter into a shared reflection on what we do with images and technologies.

The training was about “audiovisual productions and new media.” A title that might seem technical, even off-putting. But what interests me in this subject is not so much the technology itself as what it reveals about our ways of working, creating, and connecting with others. “New media” does not refer to a stable object: by definition, it is what is new at a given moment, before becoming old. The smartphone was a new medium in 2007. It no longer is. This obvious fact opens a fundamental question: what, in these permanent mutations, truly deserves our attention, allows us to build our professional future?

A Heritage of Thought on the Table

The books I had brought formed a kind of intellectual cartography: essays on platform economics, critical reflections on artificial intelligence, the catalog from the AI exhibition at the Jeu de Paume Museum, the managerial account by Netflix’s leadership, a biography of Ada Lovelace, the woman who invented the foundations of computing in 1840, well before computers existed, etc. The idea was simple: to invite participants to wander, browse, photograph what caught their attention, then share these images via a digital tool hosted on my own server—not on Google, not on GAFAM platforms.

This first exercise was not trivial. It immediately raised several crucial questions: that of digital sovereignty (who owns our images?), that of attention (what attracts us in a book, a cover, a title?), and that of legitimacy (daring to take a photo, share it, own it in front of others). Because while browsing a book is a solitary gesture, photographing a passage and sending it to a collective space turns it into an act of sharing, of self-exposure.

The Permanent Invention of Forms

I reminded participants that cinema itself was a “new medium” at its birth in 1895. Nobody knew what it would be used for. During its first ten years, before it began generating enormous profits, it was mainly women who invented it: Alice Guy, for example, the first female director in history, who made hundreds of films. Then, when money arrived, patriarchy reclaimed its rights, and women were pushed out of positions of responsibility. This history repeats itself: innovation often comes from the margins, from those who have nothing to lose, before being co-opted by systems of domination.
I proposed a simple framework for thinking about new media: four interdependent dimensions:

• technology,
• economic model,
• uses,
• content.

You can have brilliant technology without an economic model (virtual reality remains a textbook case). You can have massive usage without the content keeping pace. These four poles must articulate together for a medium to establish itself durably in our lives. And this articulation is anything but natural: it is constructed, negotiated, contested.

Netflix and Horizontal Work

We spent significant time on the Netflix case, not to praise it, but to understand what their work organization reveals about contemporary transformations. The book No Rules Rules (2022) describes a corporate culture where employees make their own decisions, where vacation time is not monitored, where mistakes are valued as sources of learning. This philosophy, inspired by the concept of “liberated companies,” rests on a powerful idea: it is by making people responsible that you unleash their creativity. The summary of the Netflix method is made public on their website: Netflix Jobs Culture.

What interests me here is not to say that Netflix is a model to follow blindly—their system remains ruthless, very American in its brutality. Rather, it is to show that work methods are not neutral. The way a team is organized, how decision-making power is distributed, how risk-taking is welcomed or not—all of this shapes what can be created. And in the French audiovisual sector, still very hierarchical, these reflections are valuable, because they explain the lack of innovation in content and economic models.

The Long Tail and Cultural Diversification

I presented the concept of the « long tail » developed by Chris Anderson in 2006. His idea is simple but essential: in the physical world, a bookstore can only stock a few thousand titles; on the Internet, Amazon can offer millions. Best-sellers represent a shrinking share of revenue, while the sum of marginal sales—all those books that sell only a few copies—ends up constituting a significant part of the economy. In other words, digital technology enables unprecedented diversification of the cultural offering.

This transformation has profound consequences for creators. It means there is an audience for highly singular works, films that fit no category, hybrid documentaries that match no television format—and this over the long term. The challenge then becomes finding this audience, building a community around one’s work. It is a new form of freedom, but also a responsibility: no one will come looking for us; we must go toward the viewers, build a relationship with them.

Creating Together: The Photography Exercise

By late morning, we shifted into practice. I proposed a simple exercise: create a photograph on the theme of “new media.” A single image, in ten minutes, with only your phone as a tool. The participants played along with remarkable creativity: sophisticated compositions on screens and their reflections, staged scenes evoking drowning in information, images playing on the ambiguity between reality and its representation.

What struck me was the quality of the discussions that followed. Each image was projected, and the other participants commented on what they saw in it, without the author intervening. This rule of the author’s silence is fundamental: it allows us to discover that our creation says things we had not consciously intended. The meaning of a work does not belong to its author; it is constructed in the relationship with those who receive it. This, ultimately, is what social networks have democratized: this horizontality between creators and viewers, this co-construction of meaning.

Artificial Intelligence: Threat or Invitation?

The question of artificial intelligence ran through the entire day. The concerns are legitimate: automated editing, AI-generated images, audio cleaning functions that replace hours of technical work. Jobs are threatened, that is undeniable. But I wanted to offer another perspective. In 2016, when the AlphaGo software defeated the world’s best Go player, something fundamental happened: the machine won not through brute computational force, but by inventing moves no human had imagined. A form of algorithmic creativity appeared, different from ours, but creativity nonetheless.

Faced with this, our humanity does not lie in opposing the machine, but in what it cannot do: empathy, embodied intuition, the capacity to give meaning to the unexpected, to make something bloom from nothing. AI can help us explore uncharted narrative territories, save time on repetitive and cognitive tasks, provided we keep control over what really matters: the why of what we do, the ethical intention that guides our work.

What the Day Taught Me

A training session is never one-way. The participants nourished me with their questions, their doubts, their experiences. A documentary filmmaker told us about their difficulties in getting a hybrid film to exist in a system that demands clear categories. A youth center leader described how she was already intuitively applying horizontal management principles in her recreation center, and how much her hierarchy criticized her for it. These testimonies confirm what I have felt for a long time: more humane work methods, more respectful of everyone’s intelligence, already exist in the interstices of the system. They are waiting to be recognized, legitimized, generalized.

At the end of the day, we worked with CapCut, a video editing application accessible to all and of incredible quality and ergonomic design. The participants created short videos from the photographs made in the morning, adding sound, rhythm, narration. This transition from still image to moving image, from individual work to teamwork, perfectly illustrated what “new media” are: not tools, but opportunities to rethink our ways of doing, collaborating, and giving shape to our imaginations.

The Horizon

What remains from this day is perhaps less the concepts transmitted than the shared experience. We created together, we dared to show our vulnerabilities, we discovered that our ideas, even uncertain ones, had value as soon as they were welcomed by a benevolent collective. This, ultimately, is what digital technologies make possible: not dehumanization, but a new form of relationship, more horizontal, more democratic. Provided we want it, build it, and never delegate our humanity to machines.