Cambio di stagione. Tramonto delle culture politiche e trionfo della ‘neo-cultura televisiva’

[Autom. eng. transl.] The transition from the late seventies to the early eighties marks a radical transformation of the Italian cultural and media industry, defining lasting fundamentals for the next thirty years. The essay aims to deepen and illustrate the "change of season" that takes place in Italy between 1976-1977 (end of the public monopoly on broadcasting, start of color broadcasts, end of Carosello) and 1983-1984 (construction of the Berlusconi empire of commercial TV). Three distinct but related planes define this crucial historical phase: the "individualist" socio-cultural revolution, the overall transformation of the "media system" (the hegemonic centrality of the television medium on the economic, political and symbolic level) and the redefinition of the relationship between the "traditional political cultures" that had dominated the post-war period and the cultural industry itself (reversal of the relations between television and politics). Over the last thirty years the television medium, starting precisely from that "change of season" of the last century, has developed its own popular "neo-culture" completely emancipated with respect to traditional political cultures, where commercial TV has been a center of gravity and point of origin. The writing represents, then, an important vademecum to understand a recent past that seems, however, to have not yet ended.