Structure, Audience and Soft Power in East Asian Pop Culture by Beng Huat Chua

Author:Beng Huat Chua [Chua, Beng Huat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789882208704
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Published: 2012-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

5 The Structure of Identification and Distancing in Watching East Asian Television Drama

The routine flows of television drama series across national, cultural and linguistic boundaries in East Asia have been characterized “as a self-aware but non-consensual force field articulated by the region’s mixed postcolonial experiences, negotiation with globalization, and interacting media cultures” (Tsai 2005: 102). Within this non-consensual force field are the highly uneven flows of Japanese and Korean products entering Pop Culture China and a trickle at best of the reverse flow of Chinese languages products into Korea and Japan, particularly the latter.1 In part as a consequence of lower production qualities, Chinese languages productions in every location have been losing their domestic audience to imported Korean and Japanese dramas for the past two decades.

As mentioned in Chapter 1, of the three genres of transnational East Asian Pop Culture—music, films and television dramas—drama has the most pronounced and tractable impact on the cultural practices of the audience. As pointed out in an earlier chapter, this is because serial drama demands regular viewing by the audience. Many activities need to be displaced, even sacrificed, in order to catch the regularly scheduled episodes. If one misses an episode, efforts then have to be made to view it before the next instalment is screened. The result is an active engagement, with each episode drawing the audience further into a virtual but intimate relationship with the characters in the drama. It is thus unsurprising that media audience reception research generally focuses on television audiences.

It is by now commonplace to suggest that the meaning of a media text is not simply the apprehending of the writer/producer’s intended meaning by the reader/audience. Nevertheless, that the writer/producer does intend and encode a certain meaning remains the case; furthermore, this encoded meaning may be said to be the “dominant” or “preferred” meaning of the text.2 This dominant meaning frames the space of identification with the characters in the text, as selected by the writer/producer, for the reader/audience. It creates the reception space and position—a subject position—for its reader/audience. If the audience accedes, consciously or otherwise, to the dominant meaning and subject position offered by the text, one would be identifying with its preferred character(s); conversely, when one resists the dominant meaning and subject position offered, one distances oneself from the same character(s).

It should be noted that the text is not consumed only as an entire unit, as a coherent whole, but also in a fragmentary manner. In addition to an overall sense of the whole, different components of the text may be treated differently by the same audience. Consistent with this fragmentary consumption, reception of a text involves intermittent moments of identification and distancing from the dominant meaning during real time reading/watching. This, combined with the fact that audiences bring to bear their own context within which to interpret the text, and come to the text from different angles to actively develop preferred meanings of their own, means they may end up accepting, modifying, resisting or otherwise disrupting the dominant meaning.

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