White paper on creativity - ebla center

Chapter 8Chapter 8Television, Radio and Publishing8.1 General RemarksSince the 1940s, book publishing, radioand television have been considered themain sectors of the “cultural industry”along with cinema, music (records) andnews<strong>paper</strong>s and periodicals even thoughthe concept itself of “cultural industry”has a strong critical bias. Products inthese sectors are the outcome of theelaboration and/or diffusion of contentfrom the fields of literature, music, essaywriting, performing arts andinformation. The content is managedmainly according to market criteria,despite the presence of powerful publicplayers (radio and television weremanaged by a monopoly until the 1970s,today state-run networks compete withprivate enterprise) and a non-profitsector which, again in the field of radioand television, is subject to its ownspecific regulations. All of these sectorshave a strategic function in the overallproduction of culture in the country.Publishing books is the oldest sector ofthe cultural industry. Historically it hadthe task of promoting and disseminatingtexts on literature, science, education orof a practical nature (from tourist guidesto handbooks for a great variety ofprofessional or amateur activities). Thehealth of the book publishing sectorand its trends are thus one of the mostrevealing symptoms of the state ofnational cultural life in the widest sense.Radio and television (the former sincethe inter-war period and the latter sincethe 1950s) have been the primary meansfor disseminating culture in general, ifonly because, of all the media they arethe first and second in terms of timespent using them in Italy (but alsoelsewhere). According to Censis/Ucsifigures (2005), 95.4% of Italians declarethey are habitual users of the television(another 1.8% are occasional users),while 59% are habitual radio users(11.1% occasional users). Books lag farbehind these figures: only 31.5%habitual readers plus 15.1% occasionalreaders (we will return to these figuresbelow). Moreover, television inparticular is the main vehicle for filmsand an extraordinary promoter of allkinds of cultural products, includingbooks.The fact remains, that despite the cleardifferences in terms of size anddistinctive features between the varioussectors, they have some common traitsworth dwelling on and which are onlypartly typical of the whole Italiancultural industry.WHITE PAPER ON CREATIVITY 192