Media and Celebrity Culture

Week 8 - 28th August 2012

  We can get our news and entertainment from more sources than ever before because of the emergence of the Internet. It is an irresistible general trend that the ratio of media environment and representation has changed into an era of personae where an online culture consists of different platforms that allow for different flows of messages, media and images to publish of the self. Celebrity culture is a good example of culture exchange and movement from the private to the public, the individual over the social formations.


http://www.twi5.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/
twitter-apps-celebrities-that-twitter-celebrity-twitter-feed.jpg

  Celebrity and gossip both are always together, like a person and his shadow; celebrity relay on gossip to generate media exposure while gossip relay on celebrity to produce gossip. This activity can be defined as self-production which “the elaborate celebrity gossip can be seen as providing a continuity of discourse around the presentation of the self for public consumption” (Marshall, 2010, pp.36-37). Generally, gossip is revealing celebrity’s private experiences to uncover a hidden truth about celebrity and their image (Marshall, 2008, p. 499), and usually reveals via paparazzi. But now it reveals via social media and sometimes originally discourse from celebrity their selves. The recent photo scandal of Prince Harry is a good example. 



http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQobDdoILzRy
RWYjUmIlCaYdUfaPcX-GvOjfFBvdG7X51QO8ZD_&t=1

I am not a Chinese Twitter Micro Blog user but I am familiar with it as my friend is a Micro Blog user who follows every pages and status of her favorite’s celebrities and brand products, and every time she checks status, she will share and discuss with me. I don’t even have to buy any second-hand sources such as a printed newspaper or magazine to get first-hand news and information, but by “like” or follow celebrity’s Facebook pages or Micro-blog. In which, these “Friends” and follower also created a micro-public networks which is part of an individual’s online persona, and an intercommunication that an individual’s movement (e.g. you “like” Starbucks page and made comments, both physical and virtual movement) exchange between the personal and the highly mediated.

 

Talks and speeches about blogging and microblog in China:

1. Yang Lan: The generation that's remaking China

2. Michael Anti: Behind the Great Firewall of China

 

Reference:
Marshall, P.D 2008, The Specular Economy, Society. Vol. 47, pp.498-502.

Marshall, P.D 2010, The promotion and presentation of the self: celebrity as marker of presentational media, Celebrity Studies, Routledge, London, pp. 35-48.

The Effectiveness of Narrowcasting

Week 7 - 21st August 2012
 


http://www.elainer.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/moods_and_weather.jpg

  Continued from the preceding blog, for diasporic people or exile, because of they are living outside from the homeland where its national culture has already unbreakably embedded in their identity, thus a need for satisfy their nostalgia and not to be disconnectedness with their homeland. The emerged networked, digital and mediated space of cyberspace provides an easy and efficient way for diasporic communities to maintain connection with the homeland. The media such as narrowcasting television and online video (e.g. YouTube or Vimeo) are good examples.

  Naficy (2003) divided narrowcasting into three categories of television, in which I would like to talk about transnational and diaspora television. “Transnational television consists primarily of media imported into the USA or of programs produced by USA and multinational or transnational media concerns”; and “Diaspora television is made in the host country by liminars and exiles as a response to and in tandem with their own transitional and/or provisional status” (Naficy, 2003, pp.51-52).

  The only narrowcasting television I familiar with and fits to definition of transnational and diaspora television, in Australia, is TVBJ, the only satellite television channel in Australia offering audience all TVB programs in Cantonese.

TVB, Television Broadcasts Limited is the second over-the-air commercial television station in Hong Kong. TVBJ emerged in Australia since July 2000. TVBJ mainly broadcasts programs produced by TVB in Hong Kong, including news, drama series, entertainments and informative programs etc. In which, those drama series are all “made in Hong Kong” and broadcast simultaneous with Hong Kong. Besides, TVBJ also produces and broadcasts local news and informational programs such as Australian News, PublicForum etc. which all produced at Australia.



http://bonnielovestvb.files.wordpress.com/
2012/02/tvb_logo1.jpg

  I guess what make narrowcasting television effective are they are broadcasted in foreign languages which limits audience reach and helps the diasporic people or exile to negotiate “a sense of order in the life of its viewers by producing a series of systematic patterns of narration, signification and consumption that set up continually fulfilled or postponed expectations” (Naficy, 2003, p.53).

  Or maybe an alternative reason for the effectiveness of such narrowcasting television can be it attracts consumer, benefit to earn profit. As I don’t have a television at home, so the only chance that I can watch TVBJ is when I go to a Hong Kong style’s restaurant for a meal.

 

Reference:
Naficy, H 2003,'Narrowcasting in diaspora: Middle Eastern television in Los Angeles', in KH Karim (ed.), The media of diaspora, Routledge, London, pp. 51-62.

Making Culture Part II - Nostalgia of Exile

Week 6 - 14th August 2012

   Continued from the preceding blog, due to political, educational, and economic movements such as the Cultural Revolution and the June 4^th Incident in 1989, and the decolonization in Hong Kong, a massive number of Chinese and Hong Kong residents left and immigrant to overseas since 1980s. For these people now living outside China in the age of globalisation, how do they perceive their identity? What is the role of the different media in the making of diasporic and immigrant cultures? How do satellite television, internet, mobile phone coverage etc. create a media space that cuts across national boundaries to form a transnational space?

  Appadurai describes this group of diasporic people or immigrant community as “anguish of displacement” and the “nostalgia of exile” (Sun, 2002). It is because of they confront a complex situation in a diasporic public space, where living in-between national space vs. the homeland, such as racial differences, “foreignness” appearances, accent and behaviour; and the disconnection with China increases desirous of maintaining their regular consumption of Chinese cultures (Sun, 2002).

For example, immigrant communities (former mainland Chinese) would watch Chinese television drama series by install a satellite television. Satellite television provides an immediate access of the latest news of mainland China to former mainland Chinese; you do not have to be at a certain location or face-to-face communities to receive certain information, it is non-physical nature, also called virtual neighborhoods.

Indeed, even I am not an immigrant from Hong Kong but a temporary overseas student in Australia, I still do not like being disconnected with my homeland; I do not have a satellite television but I could purchase Chinese television drama DVDs at Chinese DVDs shop that opened by former mainland Chinese (or download from the internet), reading electronic newspapers from Hong Kong’s website, watching Chinese film at Australian cinema, talking to family on the phone with Facetime etc. to maintain my connection with my homeland; all of these media together to cut across China-Australia boundaries to form a transnational space.

  With the emerged networked, digital and mediated space of cyberspace, it is so easy for diasporic communities to form and exchange information and maintain relationships, and make new and hybridized cultural identities.

Reference: Sun, W 2002, ‘Fantasizing the homeland, the internet, memory and exilic longings’, Leaving China: media, migration, and transnational imagination, Rowan & Littlefield, Lanham, Md., pp. 113–36.