Media consumption in the cross-cultural context: Transnational television fiction and Taiwanese young audience.

摘要

This dissertation explores Taiwanese young audiences' consumption of transnational television fiction programs. The study puts forward a series of analyses to examine how young audiences in Taiwan select, evaluate, use, and interact with television fictions imported from three groups of program sources---international source (the United States), pan-regional source (Japan and Korea) and regional source (Singapore, Mainland China and Hong Kong).; Drawing from in-depth interview data with 53 Taiwanese teenagers and young adults, this study analyzes the role of "audience autonomy" in the formation of viewing preference, pleasure and engagement among young audiences. The research findings demonstrate the following implications with regard to young people's media consumption in the cross-cultural context.; Firstly, the viewing preference of young audiences is a product of the negotiation between cultural distance, geographic distance, and program value embedded in various imports. In addition, young audiences show different genre preference toward regional, pan-regional, and international programs. When watching programs imported from culturally distant sources, young audiences prefer comedy genre. When watching programs from culturally proximate sources, drama genre is usually the first choice.; Secondly, the viewing pleasures young audiences experience with watching imported television fictions are highly associated with the crossing and borrowing of various cultural resources. In particular, the cross-cultural viewing pleasures stem from: (1) the appreciation of fashion commodities; (2) the acquisition of linguistic capital; (3) the search for utopian romance; (4) the virtual travel in the fictional world and; (5) the aspiration of modern lifestyles. Young audiences actively make use of the symbolic commodities and cultural codes disseminated via transnational television programs to construct cosmopolitan identities.; Thirdly, the interactions between transnational television fictions and young audiences are multi-dimensional. At the individual level, young audiences cognitively discern the aesthetic features and production modes of foreign materials (aesthetic engagement) but affectively develop intimate and participatory relationships with television characters (parasocial engagement). At the collective level, young audiences construct unique "audience communities" by engaging in cross-medium consumption (intertextual engagement) and involving in "television talk" with peers within their social networks (social-networking engagement).