I've recently seen this movie, Videocracy by Erik Gandini. For those who don't know the film, it's a documentary by this italian - swedish guy about the influence that television has on the italian style of life, the impact of tv images on the culture of my country.
The values that you get from our avarage tv program are quite low, you often have some almost naked woman in the show(and often she is very useless there, she just stand in the back wearing a bikini and smiling) and the people that are presented as "successful" reached their top not throught knowledge, hard work or cleverness, but due to their beauty or for even more banal reasons. Just to make an example,the tv-news of one of our major channels(Studio Aperto, on Italia1 of the Mediaset group) is just ridiculus. They often leave a short time for the main news of the day, then mostly talk about gossip or minor issues, with also ridiculus interview to people around the street. In summer you can also see an "intersting" 5 mins report around italian beaches asking people "hey, do you think the weather is too hot this year?".
Now I don't consider myself a moralist, but I really believe that, as this movie underline, that this kind of tv is really moving italian culture in a way I can't be proud of. It's almost impossible to find a decent information program before late night, apart a very few exceptions. The situation is slightly different now that the satellite tv(and its many channels) is reaching more and more people. Also the net is a partial solution, many people can "integrate" their knowledge with such a various panorama as the one that internet offers. The "heroes" that Videocracy presents are really considered like that by many people here in Italy. Those are the ones who managed to reach the top. And it's discouraging, I think.
I don't want to debate the political side of this situation(Berlusconi, the prime minister, owning three major channels and some of the "paper mass media" for example or simply the fact that the trailer of Videocracy has been banned on our tv because it contains "a political message against our government"). I have other questions to point out. First of all, right now the problem are the people or those who decide what we are supposed to watch? The new god is the audience research statistic and it really seems that a couple of half-naked gorgeous women improve the number of people watching it. Now I wonder: are the people in front of the tv actually demanding for such a low tv service, or is it up to the tv owners to keep the level to a certain standard? The tv owners have kept this kind of television that people are now expecting just that on tv, or they actually offered just what people were waiting for? I don't have a proper answer honestly. But I believe that probably the "guilty" is somewhere in the middle(but closer to the first possibility), as I believe that people in my country are not that stupid to wait only for nice girls and interviews about the weather. But when I go to meet a couple of friends of mine abroad and they tell me that, when they browse around international channels on tv, they can easily recognize an italian channel among the others by the amount of half-naked useless girls in the show, well, it's discouraging.
