Storie della televisione: dalle origini alla convergenza

[Autom. eng. transl.] Television as a means of communication has characterized the contemporary history of Europe and North America, from the "archaeological" phase of the 1930s to the present day, marked by digitization and fragmentation. "Stories of television: from the origins to the convergence" is the opening essay of the volume "The television" (Carocci, 2017) and intends to retrace, systematizing them, the different "stories of the television medium", or the stages and transformation processes that have characterized the story of the evolution of the small screen. Specifically, the writing has the task of "reviving" the approximately seventy years of history of European and Italian television, using a series of concepts widely used in historiographical literature and, in particular, to the tripartite proposed by John Ellis who rereads, modifies and deepens the "paleo-neo" television dichotomy developed by Umberto Eco in the early 1980s. Thus we will pass from a first analysis relative to the origins phase, the so-called "age of scarcity", to the study of the "age of competition" and its "neotelevision", up to a final focus on the current "age of abundance ", multi-TV and the phenomenon of media convergence that we are experiencing.