Il tempo condiviso. Per una breve storia degli studi sulla temporalità televisiva in Italia

Research on the media in Italy has been focusing since the 1960s on the temporal dimension of television as a crucial element of analysis, stating from the pioneering studies by Umberto Eco and Gianfranco Bettetini on live broadcasts. From that time on this object, between semiotics and sociology, has been investigated through many aspects. In particular, the organisation of the program offer in the shape of the broadcasting schedule, especially in the neotelevision context, has been studied as a condition for a relationship of trust with the spectator, as a self-promotion strategy, or even as an overall discourse created by the broadcaster. In particular, the relation between temporal organisation of the broadcasting schedule and the social structuring of individual and family time has shed light on the mimetic and regulatory nature of television temporality. In addition, the ethnographic turning point has heightened the attention on the way television constitutes an environmental resource through which part of the domestic and family consumption of TV is shaped. As well as fulfilling the function of an interface between the organisation of offer and consumption, the time of television also stands in a relation to long seriality and to the establishment of a veritable flow of programming. Yet, with reference to the fragment, it also bears a relation to micro-texts that contribute to giving shape and body to the broadcasting schedule macrotext. In this sense, it can represent a metaphor of the cultural and social forms of our present time.