Images of the Public. The Construction of Television Audience through the Process of Institutionalization of Italian Early Television 1953-1955 (original) (raw)

2010, Comunicazioni sociali online

In the early stage of Italian television, between the end of the experimental phase and the beginning of regular programming (in 1954), the issue of audience strongly arose: who was supposed to be the addressee for the new medium? Which images of the public were built and circulated in the public sphere? What kind of audience picture was driven by the apparatus and made visible through scheduling practices, TV genres and first programmes? The paper investigates the process of institutionalisation of Italian television, focusing on the specific topic of the construction of a unified, and almost stable, image of its audience and has been developed comparing and analysing various kind of sources: the references and the audience simulacra visible in early programmes, still conserved in Rai’s archives; the images of the public shaped by managers, producers, insiders and technicians, crystallised in several para-texts, such as technical journals or house-organs (for instance, the «Radiocorriere»); the idea of early TV audience emerging from broadsheet newspapers (such as «Corriere della Sera» and «Corriere d’Informazione») and popular press (the magazine «La televisione illustrata»), as well as from the first television criticism. The essay tries to demonstrate how traditional and passive patterns of spectatorship, re-mediated from theatre and cinema, were merged with several calls for interaction with the small screen, inspired by the models of previous popular entertainment shows (such as funfairs and entertainment parks).