La canzone napoletana 1880-1920. Dinamiche ed elementi della comunicazione

In this article the society is analysed like a communication net. This net has neuralgic nodes where there are so many relations that any phenomenon running this place (the node) can became a social fact. The town is the most tangible representation of this net, because these nodes get visible in it (streets, squares, telephone nets, houses, deserts, ect.) and it is a favourite object of analysis. Naples - as a communication net - is the object of this essay and in particular three most important nodes have been considered with reference to the exceptional diffusion of the Neapolitan song in any social class and even out of the Neapolitan area: the social gathering, the publishing trade and the street. The analysis of the first two nodes and the correlate dynamics brings to a scheme that can be defined cultural industry. But the generic definition of cultural industry does not take into account the specificity of the Neapolitan town-society; Naples could not be considered an industrial town yet. What seems to be a cultural industry - impressively up-to-dated but unparalleled with the structure of the town - is nothing but the synthesis of new elements (reification of the cultural product) and communicative elements typical of the area (natural communication nets: the street). From the town’s body (metaphor of the complexity and unicity) an exceptional fact has come out, not as a logical consequence of an ideal state of events and situation (industrial town/cultural industry) but as delivery in the vacuum, baroque giddiness.

Claudio Silvestri, La canzone napoletana 1880-1920. Dinamiche ed elementi della comunicazione in "SOCIOLOGIA DELLA COMUNICAZIONE " 30/2000, pp , DOI: