Lifestyle Media in Asia

Lifestyle Media in Asia

Author: Fran Martin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-20

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1317567374

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Across Asia, consumer culture is increasingly shaping everyday life, with neoliberal economic and social policies increasingly adopted by governments who see their citizens as individualised, sovereign consumers with choices about their lifestyles and identities. One aspect of this development has been the emergence of new wealthy middle classes with lifestyle aspirations shaped by national, regional and global media – especially by a range of new popular lifestyle media, which includes magazines, television and mobile and social media. This book explores how far everyday conceptions and experiences of identity are being transformed by media cultures across the region. It considers a range of different media in different Asian contexts, contrasting how the shaping of lifestyles in Asia differs from similar processes in Western countries, and assessing how the new lifestyle media represents not just a new emergent media culture, but also illustrates wider cultural and social changes in the Asian region.


Media in Asia

Media in Asia

Author: Youna Kim

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-05-15

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 1000584356

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This book is an upper-level student source book for contemporary approaches to media studies in Asia, which will appeal across a wide range of social sciences and humanities subjects including media and communication studies, Asian studies, cultural studies, sociology and anthropology. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives from media and communications, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology and Asian studies, it provides an empirically rich and stimulating tour of key areas of study. The book combines theoretical perspectives with grounded case studies in one up-to-date and accessible volume, going beyond the standard Euro-American view of the evolving and complex dynamics of the media today.


Consumption in Asia

Consumption in Asia

Author: Beng-Huat Chua

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-05-03

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1134572360

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The essays in this collection challenge conventional ideas about consumption and consumerism: they consider if the inundation of Western consumer goods have created identity confusions among the affluent in Asia, and if the expansion of consumer culture really does threaten the stability of politically anti-liberal states in Asia. This is the first book to analyse in detial consumerism in the region, and will be valuable reading for students and researchers in Asian studies, economics, politics and cultural studies.


Televising Chineseness

Televising Chineseness

Author: Geng Song

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2022-05-09

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 0472220047

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The serial narrative is one of the most robust and popular forms of storytelling in contemporary China. With a domestic audience of one billion-plus and growing transnational influence and accessibility, this form of storytelling is becoming the centerpiece of a fast-growing digital entertainment industry and a new symbol and carrier of China’s soft power. Televising Chineseness: Gender, Nation, and Subjectivity explores how television and online dramas imagine the Chinese nation and form postsocialist Chinese gendered subjects. The book addresses a conspicuous paradox in Chinese popular culture today: the coexistence of increasingly diverse gender presentations and conservative gender policing by the government, viewers, and society. Using first-hand data collected through interviews and focus group discussions with audiences comprising viewers of different ages, genders, and educational backgrounds, Televising Chineseness sheds light on how television culture relates to the power mechanisms and truth regimes that shape the understanding of gender and the construction of gendered subjects in postsocialist China.


Green Asia

Green Asia

Author: Tania Lewis

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-09-13

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 131752473X

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Economic development in Asia is associated with expanding urbanism, overconsumption, and a steep growth in living standards. At the same time, rapid urbanisation, changing class consciousness, and a new rural–urban divide in the region have led to fundamental shifts in the way ecological concerns are articulated politically and culturally. Moreover, these changes are often viewed through a Western moralistic lens, which at the same time applauds Asia’s economic growth as the welcome reviver of a floundering world economy and simultaneously condemns this growth as encouraging hyperconsumerism and a rupture with more natural ways of living. This book presents an analysis of a range of practices and activities from across Asia that demonstrate that people in Asia are alert to ecological concerns, that they are taking action to implement new styles of green living, and that Asia offers interesting alternatives to narrow Anglo-American models of sustainable living. Subjects explored include eco-tourism in the Philippines, green co-operatives in Korea, the importance of "tradition" within Asian discourses of sustainability, and much more.


Telemodernities

Telemodernities

Author: Tania Lewis

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2016-09-09

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 0822373904

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Yoga gurus on lifestyle cable channels targeting time-pressured Indian urbanites; Chinese dating shows promoting competitive individualism; Taiwanese domestic makeover formats combining feng shui with life planning advice: Asian TV screens are increasingly home to a wild proliferation of popular factual programs providing lifestyle guidance to viewers. In Telemodernities Tania Lewis, Fran Martin, and Wanning Sun demonstrate how lifestyle-oriented popular factual television illuminates key aspects of late modernities in South and East Asia, offering insights not only into early twenty-first-century media cultures but also into wider developments in the nature of public and private life, identity, citizenship, and social engagement. Drawing on extensive interviews with television industry professionals and audiences across China, India, Taiwan, and Singapore, Telemodernities uses popular lifestyle television as a tool to help us understand emergent forms of identity, sociality, and capitalist modernity in Asia.


Introducing Korean Popular Culture

Introducing Korean Popular Culture

Author: Youna Kim

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-06-28

Total Pages: 473

ISBN-13: 1000892263

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This new textbook is a timely and interdisciplinary resource for students looking for an introduction to Korean popular culture, exploring the multifaceted meaning of Korean popular culture at micro and macro levels and the process of cultural production, representation, circulation and consumption in a global context. Drawing on perspectives from the humanities and social sciences, including media and communications, film studies, musicology, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, history and literature, this book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of Korean popular culture and its historical underpinnings, changing roles and dynamic meanings in the present moment of the digital social media age. The book’s sections include: K-pop Music Popular Cinema Television Web Drama, Webtoon and Animation Digital Games and Esports Lifestyle Media, Fashion and Food Nation Branding An accessible, comprehensive and thought-provoking work, providing historical and contemporary contexts, key issues and debates, this textbook will appeal to students of and providers of courses on popular culture, media studies and Korean culture and society more broadly.


Sustainability Citizenship in Cities

Sustainability Citizenship in Cities

Author: Ralph Horne

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-28

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1317391071

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Urban sustainability citizenship situates citizens as social change agents with an ethical and self-interested stake in living sustainably with the rest of Earth. Such citizens not only engage in sustainable household practices but respect the importance of awareness raising, discussion and debates on sustainability policies for the common good and maintenance of Earth’s ecosystems. Sustainability Citizenship in Cities seeks to explain how sustainability citizenship can manifest in urban built environments as both responsibilities and rights. Contributors elaborate on the concept of urban sustainability citizenship as a participatory work-in-progress with the aim of setting its practice firmly on the agenda. This collection will prompt practitioners and researchers to rethink contemporary mobilisations of urban citizens challenged by various environmental crises, such as climate change, in various socio-economic settings. This book is a valuable resource for students, academics and professionals working in various disciplines and across a range of interdisciplinary fields, such as: urban environment and planning, citizenship as practice, environmental sociology, contemporary politics and governance, environmental philosophy, media and communications, and human geography.


A Critical Discourse Analysis of South Asian Women's Magazines

A Critical Discourse Analysis of South Asian Women's Magazines

Author: Linda McLoughlin

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-07-03

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1137398787

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This intriguing book applies Critical Discourse Analysis to a range of South Asian women’s lifestyle magazines, exposing the disconnection between the magazines’ representations of South Asian women and the lived realities of the target audience. The author challenges the notion that discourses of freedom and choice employed by women’s magazines are emancipatory, demonstrating instead that the version of feminism on offer is a commodified form which accords with the commercial aims of the publications. McLoughlin demonstrates that whilst British magazines present women in the East as the exotic and culturally superior ‘Other’, women in India are encouraged to emulate Western women to signify their engagement with globalization and modernity. She uses data from focus groups carried out in both countries to illustrate the interpretive frameworks and multivocality of participants’ attitudes, experiences and beliefs. This thought-provoking book will appeal to students and researchers of Language and Linguistics, Women’s Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Media, Communications and Cultural Studies.


Chinese Television and National Identity Construction

Chinese Television and National Identity Construction

Author: Lauren Gorfinkel

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-03

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1317667778

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This book examines music entertainment programmes on China Central Television, China’s only national level television network, as well as on nationally-available provincial channels, exploring how such programmes project a nuanced image of China’s identity and position in the world. It shows how the images presented - primarily to domestic audiences - are in step with China’s party-state nationalism, and at the same time flexible and open to change as China’s circumstances change. The book contextualises identity construction in the media by examining the development of television in China and the political struggles between provincial and national television stations, as well as by foregrounding the historical and contemporary role of musical culture in China's nation-building project. It discusses the portrayal of the majority Han Chinese, and of ethnic minorities and their music, which, the author argues, are shown as fitting with the party-state rhetoric of “a unitary multi-ethnic state”. It also outlines how the Chinese of Greater China – Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao and the overseas Chinese – are incorporated into a mainland centred Chinese identity. In addition, it shows how the performances of foreign personalities on the Chinese television stage emphasise foreigners' attraction to China, the uniqueness of the Chinese nation and Chinese civilisation, and the revitalised role of China in the world. Overall, the book demonstrates how the variations of Chinese identity fit with prevailing political ideologies in China and with the emerging theme of a China-centred world.