Advertising, Journalism, Fiction and Social: a comparison of symbols, patterns and cultural practices

Advertising, Journalism, Fiction and Social: a comparison of symbols, patterns and cultural practices

In this field I have examined the languages of mass culture that present cultural and symbolic aspects that can be standardized, stereotyped and predisposed to recursive replicability. The structure of a fiction, the storyboard of a commercial, the form of a journalistic article, the outline of a presenter, the post of a social profile, the subject of a screenplay or the suspended ending of each episode of a soap opera, are all gears of a routine creativity of the cultural industry. They are bureaucratized examples that do not encourage radical innovation. They need plots suitable for the serial reproduction of (short or long) narrative snapshots characterized by subjects, action schemes, paradigms and editing techniques that originate predictable topoi. They are not simply the places where the “perfect crime” of reality took place – as Braudillard claimed – but social practices that preserve the plurality of intentions of a reality that uses novelty by trivializing it. There is no identification with the authenticity of daily life made of boredom, expectations, sense of frustration and postponed choices. Not having the time to analyze the complexity of reality, these worlds choose to represent the most convenient or immediately involving stereotype. They become symbols, patterns of action and polarizing practices that crystallize agency. If representation was the key word of modernity, in the post-modern era it turns out to be a pompous mannerism of déjà-vu.