Communication plays a key role in our daily lives, the rhythm of our lives, and our understanding of the world, erasing time and distance. It's a continuous, progressive process that, especially today, sees the recipients of media messages assume a new, more aware and active role.
Ritorno al futuro
Such a scenario sees the lleadership of the old broadcaster Generalists are threatened by the sudden appearance and innovative proposals of new operators, the result of technological-evolutionary contingencies as unpredictable as they are unstoppable in their imposition on the media landscape. However, at least for the moment, the former continue to exert amedia hegemony, from a journalistic-informative perspective, especially towards a specific target audience, the older one, numerically conspicuous, tied to the analog television world and still not very digitally literate. In a sort of socio-media division between apocalyptic and integrated, this type of audience is among the former, among those who, despite the aforementioned innovations, continue to entertain with communication and information, both television and journalism, a passive relationship, purely spectatorial, characterized by voyeuristic instances which, with due exceptions, direct consumption towards pure gossip, bar chatter, and social stereotypes according to dynamics characterized by an anachronistically obsolete provincialism.
Hemorrhage of public
The emergence of such a tendency to receive media messages uncritically and superficially, rather than being censored by the broadcasters, catalyzes a substantial change in their media agenda and in the newsworthiness criteria with which they select the events to be submitted to the public. According to precise and appropriate operations of marketing, generalist operators are thus attempting to stem the haemorrhage of viewers that has been ongoing for some time, migrating towards other media and communication shores that are personalized both in terms of content and timing, because everyone sees what they want when they want. The last bastions of an old-fashioned communication, especially in the television sector, are thus attempting to renew themselves, to carve out a happy island by metabolizing, at least apparently, the loss of a hegemony that until recently was unchallenged. They do so by appealing, however, to internal spectator needs linked to a not-too-distant past, enclosed in a banquet of provincial wives made up of stereotypical judgments and discretionary, just as happened and sometimes still happens today in some Italian towns when, in the courtyard of a house, people talk about marital infidelity, the financial collapse of some unfortunate individual, or the skimpy clothing of some overly cheerful girl. As simplistic as the analysis may seem, the underlying mechanism of this type of communication is this: it follows the same dynamics, the same streams, to flow into the generalist media flow we see daily—a flow, as we will see, ethically reprehensible, but profitable, given the new landscape that has emerged, both economically and, in terms of audience, in terms of numbers.
Between reality and gossip
This trend is revealed through various evidences which, in turn, are substantiated on the television side in reality and on the purely journalistic one in the ever-constant sale of gossip magazines They move effortlessly from discussing a showgirl's murky past and new love interest to interviewing a witness or relative of the perpetrator of a brutal crime. Not only does this result in poor communication, aimed not at information but merely at personal accountability, but it also inevitably vulgarizes the audience's decoding, depriving them of the tools necessary for a conscious and critical understanding of the message received. What is apparent even to observers devoid of rudiments of sociological knowledge, equipped only with common sense, the fruit of mere experiential contingencies, is the way in which what should be news investigations undergo a silent evolutionary process that modifies them both in their external morphology and in their essence, pure and simple. Entertainment contextualized in a simplistic semantic context of gossip as an end in itself. The obvious disregard of the main purposes of the communicative message It involves a denotative and connotative distortion of the message itself, but above all, a resurgence of aberrant encodings and decodings: a distortion not of the message as such, but of the reality being conveyed. Indeed, there is a perfect correspondence between the sender's communicative intentions and what the recipient understands, but a partial or total distortion of the content of what is being conveyed and therefore interpreted, thus leading to a proportional semantic mystification of the event.
Towards an active role
Every great power entails great responsibility and media power especially if granted from above, according to dynamics top/down, is received by audiences with fideistic and uncritical intent. Any inference or generalization in this sense is misleading and unreliable. However, to better understand the picture just described, two aspects must be considered. While audiences are literate in language and media codes and therefore possess more or less effective decoding tools, there are others who, due to cultural contingencies, lack such tools and are therefore more susceptible to any type of message, unable to critically evaluate it. Even literate audiences, if exposed to a type of communication that conceals some denotative-connotative aspects of the message to highlight others, will evidently be influenced to favor the latter in their understanding of the message, constructing an evaluation of its content that is, if not biased, at least partial. Now the scenario is inevitably changing, due to historical-cultural contingencies and a greater awareness of the public as an active player in the communication process, however communication continues to represent a power that even today, at times, if exploited, manages to create an alternative reality, almost never better but always fictitious.
Marino D'Amore
