Friday, July 14, 2017
Carnegie Room (University of Glasgow)
"Trashopolis" is one of most (in)famous and historically enduring digital blogs focusing on Italian televisual entertainment, as it is regularly visited by almost four millions of Internet users since its foundation in the late 2000s. In spite of its impressive popularity among the Italian consumers of digital media, this blog does not gather information about the national or the international televisual mainstream. It instead provides its users with a collection of clips featuring the most controversial, explicit, and improper televisual performances illustrating the socially peripheral mediascape of Naples, Southern Italy. This category of TV performances, including tele-frauds by self claimed witch doctors and spiritual healers, politically incorrect invectives by televisual preachers of all kinds, and "neomelodic" pop-music videos promoting the activities and cultural values of the Camorra (a Neapolitan form of mafia cartel), belongs to a genre of TV formats, which is generally addressed in Italy as "televisione trash". While re-circulating local and "trashy" TV formats within transnational digital mediascapes, the communicative interaction between the authors and users of "Trashopolis" contribute to re-signify (and thus to "recycle") them as culturally and economically productive tools, which bring peripheral aesthetics and processes of mass-mediation back to the centre of the Italian socio-cultural mainstream. In so doing, "Trashopolis" engenders a radical (as well as problematically counter-discursive) critique to the mediacratic forms of neoliberal governance and social representation characterizing the Italian post-Berlusconian turn, and the overall socio-political tensions rising in that context between televisual and digital systems of social communication.
