Politica pop. Da 'Porta a porta' a 'L'isola dei famosi'

The merging of political sphere, popular culture and media narrations is one of the most interesting features of today’s political communication on a global scale. In recent years, especially in most Western democracies, political reality has been represented and depicted by the media following primarily the commercial imperatives dictated by the “media logic” (Altheide & Snow, 1979). The “mediatization of politics (Mazzoleni & Schulz, 1999) finds its full manifestation in the sweeping process of the popularization of political discourse. The mutual adaptation between television – with its drives for entertainment, spectacle and audience ratings – and politics striving for public attention has generated the “pop politics”: a media-centered environment spawned from the collapse of TV genres and traditional social costumes, in which politics and popular culture, information and entertainment, comedy and drama, real and surreal precipitate into a new expressive blend. By a careful contextualization of the Italian case of political television in the Berlusconi era in the relevant academic literature on popularization of politics, the book, written by a leading scholar of political communication together with an experienced connoisseur of media languages, describes and investigates the drift of Italian politics to “pop politics”. On the one hand it analyses the political determinants of the phenomenon and the main players (the media tycoon and political leader Silvio Berlusconi as the pivotal figure), on the other it explores the media-driven dynamics, such as the advent of the TV “formats”, the rise of the infotainment, and the television of intimacy. It addresses the question whether and to what extent this type of political communication affects the civic culture and political participation.