Anna Sfardini

Sono sette in Italia i principali broadcaster, cui si aggiungono le piattaforme a pagamento. Ma si affermano nuove strategie di distribuzione. Una logica puramente educativa si mescola a una orientata prevalentemente al divertimento e all’intrattenimento.

The relation between media and consumption experience constitutes one of the crucial topic within the latest sociological and Media Studies approaches. By highlighting the close connection between, on the one hand, the subject’s knowledge of the world and, on the other, the subject’s contact with the media, studies in this field have identified the media experience as playing a fundamental role in the construction of social forms in contemporary world. Within the more specific framework of Television studies, the development of new multiplatform reality formats (i.e. formats created and designed for distribution over various different means of communication, such as television, pay-Tv, the web) has become the object of a series of research focusing on various different aspects and drawing on a range of analyses. The main findings reveal that a number of changes are currently influencing the relation between media, public and society, leading towards new forms of activity and interaction. The aim of the present paper is thus to shed light on some elements of ongoing dynamism in the relation between the medium of television and the viewers, with particular emphasis on Reality Tv as a subject of investigation. The rationale for choosing this particular subject lies in its nature as a communicative context that most clearly exemplifies the on-going redefinition of the status of public television, in the sense that broadcasting is undergoing a transformation into a set of subjects who are increasingly ‘active’ and ‘performers’ on the television scene. The connection between consumption of a reality programme and the construction of identity within everyday life thus underlines the rise of a ‘viewership’ capable of managing the environment of the performance, precisely by virtue of the reconfiguration of the relationship with the media.