<nettime> mediaset vs. telestreet - the process is over: we have won :)

[marcelo@brumaria.net]

Communication concerning the legal proceedings against the authors of
"Telestreet: A Non-Regulated Imaginative Machine"

Franco Berardi Bifo, Marco Jacquemet, Giancarlo Vitali

On March 30, 2006, the Judge of Instruction of Padua decided the complaint
presented by the president of Mediaset, Fedele Confalonieri, against the
authors of "Telestreet: A Non-Regulated Imaginative Machine" in favor of
the defendants and with this ended a libelous attempt to silence a voice
of dissent.

However, it is now necessary to begin a process of radical transformation
of the communication system in which the thousands of media activists, who
have maintained the free and open channels of communication in a country
asphyxiated by a mafia monopoly and servile conformism, should play a
central role. In the difficult electoral debate that is now developing,
the center-left collation, paralyzed by its incoherent program, has not
been capable of presenting a single proposal for the transformation of the
communication system.

This is troubling because the fate of Italian democracy, as it has been in
the past, will be decided in the terrain of communication. When the
center-left had the opportunity to legislate on this issue in 1996-2001,
they lacked the courage necessary to realize a proposal and left intact
the monstrous kombinat of economic and media power that in 2001 grabbed
political power and began the forced march to the demolition of political
and social democracy. The center-left has a grave responsibility for not
having done anything to dismantle the media domination of the kombinat,
which was born illegally. However, things cannot continue like this. If
the center-left collation comes to power in the next few months, the
problem of communicative democracy should be the first order of business.

We can?t forget that modern constitutions (in particular the Italian) were
written before the diffusion of electronic media, which have so profoundly
changed the modes of social communication and of the formation of opinion.
But the necessary innovation will not come from the parties, who until now
have not demonstrated their knowledge of a logic other than that of
repartitioning. However, it could come from those who, despite the almost
complete occupation of the space of social communication by kombinat
Mediaset, have continued experimenting with forms of communicative
concatenation and have assumed the role of criticizing and of providing
grassroots information.

Beginning in 2002, Telestreet has worked with the idea of a networkind and
proliferating television, evading the influences of economic and
advertising power. From here should begin any legislative initiative that
wants to do more than put band aids on the disaster, occasioned by the
mafia?s control of the communicative system by means of a parti-cratic
intervention (a new repartitioning of the RAI) or that would not leave
things as they are or worse. Communication can?t be the property of large
economic groups nor can it be a bureaucratic system of the State. But in
order to begin the process of transformation it is necessary to displace
the economic resources of those that have excluded those resources from
the community with the innumerable groups of auto-organizing communication
who have kept alive hope.

Translation: Brian Whitener




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