Domestic Spaces in Post-Mao China by Wang Min'an & Shaobo Xie

Author:Wang, Min'an & Shaobo Xie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

5

Television is an entertaining machine, its audiences being passively entertained. They can only watch but are unable to participate – this is television’s irresolvable problem. Unlike the newly emergent internet media, television is a one-way broadcast or watching mechanism. It is entertainment, hegemonic in nature, and what it shows is unchangeable, what Roland Barthes calls a readerly text.1 True, one can read against the grain of television, resisting its hegemony, challenging the ideas or values it disseminates, but television is unaware of it and utterly indifferent. One can resist or reject television, but has no way of controlling or rewriting it. Television is intended for consumption, but not for interaction.

But people can control the computer, either in terms of what can be done to it by the user or in terms of the information or ideas that are handled with it. One can exercise their active agency on the computer. If television demands that its audiences passively receive what it offers, for instance, then the computer is not a hegemonic supplier and allows its users to actively produce programs. Just as the way in which the computer provides information is different, so are the provider of information, the information itself, and the mechanism involved in publicizing information. More importantly, the manner of entertainment is changed as well. The computer integrates work, entertainment, and information into a whole. People can only consume television, but they can do creative work on the computer. Nowadays people have an increasingly greater passion for computers than for television. Instead of sitting in front of the TV to spend the evening hours as they used to do, today people sit in front of a computer all day long. They are carried away by the computer, which means that television no longer dominates the world, though it is far from its time to exit the world. There is no doubt that television is past its prime of life. It was not that long ago that the television was so popular that when night fell, people would be glued to their seats in front of it and oblivious to the world around them. The moment the TV was turned off, the entire pictorial world was blacked out, as if all that had been heard and seen on the screen had nothing to do with the corpse-like black machine. The family emerged out of the dark night and began to busy themselves getting ready for bed and for the next day. Today, perhaps people begin their day by turning on their computer, fastening their eyes on its monitor from morning till night. It is much easier to turn off a television than a computer, for the former sits there idle for the majority of the day, while the latter can only retire to rest when its users are in bed.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.