Transnational audience reception as a theater of struggle: young Filipino women's reception of Korean television dramas

This study examines the ‘theater of struggle’ in young Filipino women's reception of Korean television dramas in view of the American cultural imperialism that is deeply entrenched in the Philippine society. Mainly anchored on Gramsci's concept of hegemony and Stuart Hall's encoding-decoding theory, the researcher conducted a reception analysis through a textual analysis of selected Korean television comedy-dramas and focus group discussions with young Filipino women in different colleges. The young Filipino women expressed cultural affinity with the culture, storylines, values, and environment in Korean and other Asian television dramas that have invaded the Philippines in the twenty-first century. ‘Negotiation, resistance, and struggle’, in Hall's sense, against both the liberalism in American dramas and the pre-modern themes in local dramas were manifested in the young women's discourses. Consequently, American cultural imperialism in the Philippines was undermined, challenged, and to some extent subverted. The study also looked into the young women's dominant, negotiated, and oppositional readings of the dominant capitalist patriarchal values and ideologies that were embedded in selected Korean dramas. While there were young female participants who subscribed to global capitalist values showing their cooptation within Western cultural hegemonic domains, the young women largely articulated negotiated readings of capitalist values and oppositional readings with regard to the dominant ideology of capitalist patriarchy. In reading the selected Korean dramas reflexively, the young women identified social pathologies of poverty, class inequality, and capitalist patriarchal values and constructed emancipatory discourses with regard to these.     

The Duality of Structure in China's National Television Market: A Network Analysis of Audience Behavior

This study adapts Giddens' structuration theory to assess audience agency and its relationship with media structures. It employs network analysis to examine the co-evolution of audience duplication patterns and elements of media structure in China's national television market. The findings reveal that Chinese audiences tend to gravitate to channels with greater market share, higher household penetration rates, and more drama programming. Furthermore, channels tend to adjust their levels of drama programming relative to patterns of audience duplication in the long run. Finally, there was evidence of higher-order patterns of audience behavior, suggesting the existence of channel repertoires, and market concentration.     

Predictors of Social Television Viewing: How Perceived Program,Media, and Audience Characteristics Affect Social Engagement With Television Programming

This study investigated social television viewing by introducing the social engagement construct. Three categories of factors, television program related perceptions, social media characteristics, and audience attributes, were proposed to predict the social engagement experience. This investigation tested 10 audience motives for using social media to engage with television content. It was found that social engagement is a complex process driven by multiple factors, particularly, program-related variables such as affinity, involvement, and genre preferences, as well as individuals' innovativeness trait.     

Reconsidering Reflexivity: Audience Research and Reality Television

Critiques of reality television assume that audiences enjoy watching participants’ humiliation or adopt the reforming injunctions of the shows. This audience research project investigates how people who watch personal makeover shows (The Biggest Loser, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Starting Over, and What Not to Wear) use these texts in meaningful ways. Data from 1,800 survey respondents and 130 interviewees demonstrate that audiences use the shows to be self reflexive, while they also are highly reflexive about media production processes. Furthermore, they are reflexive about their participation in research about a disparaged television genre. Audiences’ perception of surveillance and shame in the shows suggest how reflexivity can provide a critical distance from the programs but is not necessarily ideologically freeing.     

Engaging the Audience in a Digitised Television Production Process

This article discusses producer practices and the reasons why they engage their audience in the production process. In a digitised media context, audiences have become more visible, mainly through social media, and have more means to participate. Our research deconstructs the production process of a particular television programme by means of the “hierarchy of influences” model, which separates micro and macro levels that influence production. It draws on in-depth interviews with all editors of Flemish current affairs programme De Afspraak (The Appointment) and on a three-month participatory observation. We conclude that immersive ways of engaging the audience are applied in our specific case. More broadly, we argue that although practices change, pre-existing norms and values about the television audience remain central to how producers engage their audience through digital and social media.     

Global export of Hong Kong television: Television broadcasts limited

This study examines the business strategies of media exports by a dominant television company in Hong Kong. It is found that there are four strategies: co‐operative contract, joint venture, barter trade, and management consultancy. These strategies vary with the importing state's reactions as well as interactions between the media exporter and the importing state. The authors argue for a re‐examination of the two conventional approaches in the discussion of media imperialism, namely, the traditional theories of media imperialism and the free market approach. The new approach should emphasize the interactions among the media exporters, the state, and the audience.     

Promoting Movies on Television

Although many factors affecting a movie's success lie outside a television network's control, on-air promotion is produced by the network and can be utilized to varying degrees of effectiveness. This study measured the impact of 10 promotional variables on broadcast movie ratings by analyzing 813 prime-time promos for 137 televised movies. Results showed how the effectiveness of promotion differed according to a movie's familiarity, popularity, and compatibility. The ratings for made-for-television movies were most affected by the promotion's audience reach, frequency of exposure, and close distance in time to movie airdates; in contrast, theatrical movies aired on television were more affected by promotional reach and the construction of the promotional spot. The findings supported the general salience model of on-air program promotion but also demonstrated that the factors affecting television movie promotion differ markedly from those affecting dramatic and comedy series promotion.     

Perceived Source Credibility of Local Television News: The Impact of Television Form and Presence

An increasing number of local news stations are producing and broadcasting their newscasts in high-definition television (HDTV), but to date there has not been an investigation of audience perceptions of news in high definition. This study presents the results from an experiment investigating the influence of television form (image quality and field of view) on presence and audiences' perceptions of source credibility for news anchors and local news. The results demonstrate that improved image quality (HDTV) has a positive influence on audience perceptions of source credibility and the overall credibility of newscasts. Implications are discussed.     

The Commodity Flow of U.S. Children's Television

This article argues that commodity flow is a defining characteristic of children's television programming, and that this flow of commodity and corporate-brand images builds into the genre a relatively coherent selling ethos. Three-hour blocks of programming, recorded on two different Saturday mornings for several broadcast and cable networks, were analyzed to highlight commodity flow within and between networks. This flow of commodities on children's television indicates a blurring of the distinction between content and promotional forms and illustrates the high level of commercialism targeted at this audience.     

“If They're Trying to Say Something About My Culture … I'm Confused”: Recognizing and Resisting Authenticity in Latino-Themed Television

The television landscape has expanded to include an ever-increasing crop of culturally themed programs aimed at the Latina/o audience. Assumptions about the audience have shaped this trend, resulting in questions about the effectiveness of niche programming to satisfy viewer taste. This project investigates LatiNation with specific focus on the differences in the reception process based on participants' connection to their ethnic identity. In-depth interviews were conducted with self-identified Latina/o students who were also given a survey with scaled items to measure their connection to their ethnic identity. In general, the findings indicate that audience members produce varied readings of the text showing the participants actively negotiate identity by using LatiNation as an opportunity to both embrace and critique Latinidad.     

Building Buzz and Episodes with Bite-Sized Content: Portlandia's Formula for Turning a Video Project into a Television Series

Media consumers have grown accustomed to content that is broken down into digestible chunks. Portlandia, an Independent Film Channel (IFC) comedy series that affectionately satirizes Portland, Oregon's hipster culture, offers a model of how to attract online viewers and create television programming using short videos intended for a niche audience. IFC promotes these decoupled, song-length clips online and encourages sampling and sharing. Using interviews and an analysis of the program's structure and content, this case study explores how Portlandia takes advantage of the synergy between television and new media, and the way audiences consume video programming in the digital age.     

Agenda-Setting Through the Television Programming Schedule: An Examination of Major League Baseball on Fox

The core concept of the agenda-setting theoretical model is the transfer of topic salience from the media agenda to the public agenda. Sports leagues need to have their games properly positioned in the television programming schedule to assist their transfer of salience effort and help maximize their national popularity. A sports television programming schedule can be improved with an understanding of the fundamental structural and individual factors that influence audience media exposure. This article contends that the Major League Baseball on Fox programming schedule can be improved through three suggestions: (1) increasing exposure by having more games on the Fox over-the-air broadcast channel that is available in approximately 32 million more households than the Fox Sports One cable channel; (2) having games at a consistent placement in the programming schedule to increase viewers’ awareness and enhance that program and channel being a part of their repertoire to capitalize on their initial ritualized viewing; and (3) allowing all Major League Baseball teams to appear more often on Fox and Fox Sports One, eliminating regionalized broadcasts, and implementing a flexible schedule to provide more meaningful game matchups to capitalize on the audience’s advanced degree of instrumental viewing.     

Representations of Race in Television Commercials: A Content Analysis of Prime-Time Advertising

Given the paucity of contemporary examinations of racial/ethnic minority portrayals in television advertisements, this study analyzed the frequency, context, and quality of 2,3 15 speaking characters in a one-week sample of prime-time television commercials. Results reveal different patterns of portrayals when African American, Asian American, Latino, Native American, and White characters are featured in television advertisements. The implications of these images are examined from the perspective of social cognitive theory to provide insights into their possible impact on audience members' self-perceptions.     

Domesticating patriarchy: hegemonic masculinity and television's "Mr. Mom"

This essay examines television news treatments of stay-at-home dads (Mr. Moms)during the late 1990s and argues that these news accounts represent a challenge to more traditional masculine identities depicted in media. While offering a nominal challenge, however, these representations reinscribe significant aspects of patriarchal privilege within domestic space. Through a combination of discursive strategies compatible with the commercial needs of contemporary media organizations, television news programs' Mr. Moms operate ideologically to legitimate domesticity and nurturance as appropriately masculine. In so doing, they challenge some traditional notions about men while further solidifying a connection between these men and heterosexuality in the context of mainstream television news representations of middle-class family life in the contemporary United States. This process of legitimating nurturance and domesticity also and concurrently reverses the genders long articulated to particular advertising target segments within the commodity broadcast audience. This representational process reifies and naturalizes the class specificity of these Mr. Moms while it fuels television's continual need to produce and satisfy new audience niches in order to survive and compete in the media environment of today.     

“It’s kind of like an assault,you know”: media resisters’ meta-decoding practices of media culture

ABSTRACT

Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/decoding” essay sparked an on-going focus in media studies on reception and audience studies that remains theoretically robust today. Hall’s insight that audience members decode media content in multiple ways, some in line with the dominant cultural ideology and some resistant to that ideology, illuminates the phenomenon of media resistance. Media resisters significantly limit their media consumption and they do so based on their decodings of media culture—decodings, or readings, that resist normative messages about commercialism and consumption, about the natural diffusion and inherent benefits of mobile technologies and social media, and about the political landscape depicted and generated by news media. Hall’s encoding/decoding model is expanded here to include not only audiences’ decodings of specific content, but of media culture broadly. Concerns about media culture in the aggregate lead to media resisters’ practices of limiting media engagement, practices themselves that are counter hegemonic.     

Market Competition and the Media Performance of Taiwan's Cable Television Industry

Using industrial organization as the theoretical framework, this study examines the relation between market competition and the media performance of Taiwan's cable television industry. The media performance of cable television systems is defined as the subscribers' satisfaction with program service, customer service, and community service. A telephone survey was conducted to collect data for the study. This study's findings in general support a positive relation between market competition and media performance, which accords with most previous studies.     

Texting the Subject: Women,Television, and Modern Self-Reflexivity

Feminist audience research has often argued that the pleasures women find in watching certain popular television genres derive from their indulgence in “referential viewing”: relating their own subjective experience to television texts. But it has never been spelled out what this actually entails. This article, based upon research with women viewers of talk shows and morning magazine programs, suggests a specific methodology, “text in action,” to capture the specificities of the text/subject relationship. Findings arising from the use of this method suggest that accounts of the negotiation of subjectivity are induced through the text/subject interplay. Established explanations of “referential viewing” arrived at through traditional reception studies do not entirely account for the dialogic nature of these encounters. This article suggests that they can be more accurately explored through contemporary arguments about modern self-reflexivity where subjectivity can be seen to be discursively accomplishedthrough pragmatic actions across the broadcast encounter.     

A Network Analytic Approach to Audience Behavior and Market Structure: The Case of China and the United States

This study adopts a network analytic approach to understand media audiences in relation to media markets, bridging the literature on audience behavior and media economics. Using audience data in the Chinese and U.S. markets, we apply multi-level measures to compare audience fragmentation patterns, a key indicator of market structure, across television channels. Drawing on McQuail's four–stage fragmentation model, we find the Chinese television market exhibits the Core-Peripheral model where a few channels dominate the marketplace and the rest are viewed by niche segments of the audience. In contrast, the U.S. market represents the Pluralism model with extremely high levels of audience duplication across channels, suggesting overlapping patterns of exposure throughout the market rather than isolated segments.     

Revisiting Quality Television: Audience Perceptions

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes what the audience understands by the concept of quality as applied to television channels. This research also examines the influence of the perceived quality of the different programs broadcasted by a channel on the perceived quality of the whole channel. The empirical part is based on the answers provided by a sample of 405 respondents in Spain. The factors found to be associated with the idea of quality television by the audience are somewhat different depending on the method used to assess it, which points to the existence of social desirability bias when asking directly about it. Notwithstanding these differences, entertainment is the characteristic that the audience most consistently associates with the concept of quality in television channels. The results also show that news programs, movies and magazines, and talk shows are the genres with a greatest influence on the assessment of the quality of a television channel by the audience.     

An Exploratory Study of Factors Influencing Audience's Attitudes Toward Imported Television Programs in Taiwan

The diffusion of international television programs has been an important area of international communication research. In this article, we use theoretical constructs from country-of-origin and cultural proximity literatures and develop a model to explain audience's attitudes toward and willingness to watch imported television programs from China. Our study used a questionnaire survey method to collect data from 553 respondents in Taiwan. We examined television programs imported from China, a country that has tried to invade Taiwan to destroy its democracy in the past decades. Regression analyses found that, whereas cultural proximity was an important predictor, animosity turned out to be a more powerful predictor of Taiwanese audience's attitudes toward television programs from China. The results also demonstrated that if the Taiwanese audience perceived China as holding less animosity and more cultural proximity, they had more positive attitudes and were more willing to watch television programs imported from China.