Telemodernities: Television and Transforming Lives in Asia (Console-ing Passions) - Softcover

Lewis, Tania; Martin, Fran; Sun, Wanning

Softcover

ISBN 10: 082236204X ISBN 13: 9780822362043

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2016

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Tania Lewis is Associate Professor and Deputy Dean of Research in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University (Melbourne).

Fran Martin is Associate Professor and Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne.

Wanning Sun is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Technology Sydney.

Review

"Focused on the uncannily familiar-yet-strange world of Indian- and Chinese-language lifestyle television, this ambitious study asks what modernity is today, now that the engine room of global change has shifted decisively away from the West. Based on years of careful audience research, textual analysis and producer interviews, the answers are never less than eye-opening and, more often than not, mind-blowing. A revelation." (Chris Berry, King’s College London)

"In this groundbreaking book Tania Lewis, Fran Martin, and Wanning Sun offer a highly nuanced account of television history in India, China, and Taiwan and of emerging Asian modernities, as well as a most welcome complication of the dominant theories of globalization and neoliberalism. Emphasizing the importance of location and the specifics of national and regional contexts for television, Telemodernities has the potential to significantly change the conversation about media, modernity, and Asia." (Graeme Turner, author of Re-Inventing the Media)

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 082236204X
• ISBN 13: 9780822362043
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 324