Introduction To Contemporary Niche Culture

Cultural diversity should be beyond doubt both in a theoretical and practical view,and the niche trend of human society has been widely recognized likewise.Besides the mass and mainstream culture,the domestic society emerges many niche cultural forms relatively at present,such as little theatre drama,folk music,art film and so on,which also forebode the rise of a special cultural type,namely the niche culture.It is commonly acknowledged that the rise of niche culture and the groups would be an important cultural phenomenon in contemporary Chinese mainland,which also presents the inevitable result of economic development as well as civilization progress.Not just booming in silence practically,niche culture has already gained a certain level of media and academia attentions instead.However been talked and analyzed a lot,its concept still remains controversial.And niche culture also lacks of systematic exposition and generalization about the basic theoretical problem in the meantime,including generating mechanism,existing types,group features,cultural functions and future trend.From realistic existence to theoretical research,niche culture shows a complicated differences and relations with elite culture,subculture or mass culture,markedly implying a special feature in aesthetic taste.Therefore niche culture could be considered as a collection of culture that has been accepted,admired and spread by those people who share the same or similar true aesthetic taste gathering together in a certain spatial-temporal condition.Ideally niche culture takes real aesthetic taste as its central traits.It critically inherits the positive features from elite culture,subculture and popular culture,and spans off the negative,which showing many aspects of constructive quality consequently,such as independence,resistance,consciousness,responsibility and criticalness.Meanwhile niche culture in reality still has a certain problem in stages.Both internal and external factors have some influence during the generation of niche culture.External factors mainly include cultural policy,cultural market,social psychology and media technology.As for internal factor,it just comes to the driving force of the groups,who leading the inheritance and innovation in the cultural practice.Essentially contemporary formation of niche culture could be a kind of cultural symbols in the process of diffusion and rheology all the while.So the culturalformation would be explained by some communication links,mainly including the source,destination,information,channel,feedback and noise,and each of these possess rich connotations.Group characters of niche culture can be analyzed from the aspects of its style,structure,psychology,emotion and behavior.Niche culture groups primarily stick with independent character and critical spirits.Secondly,with a distinguishing feature of cohesiveness,the groups gather both online and offline,showing a online practice increasingly.In real life,the groups mostly gather in the cities and mainly consist of the youth.Also the groups got the shame feeling in a way.And then,resistance acts of the groups manifest as a certain kind of moderate negotiation between in-group and out-group,including markets,mass media or mainstream ideology.Similar to general fans,the niche culture groups share some analogous behaviors as well.Maintaining the cultural ecology balanced seems to be the very significance of niche culture,which will rich the cultural type,improve cultural interaction,and stimulate cultural consumption.Its cultural value,social function and economic benefit cannot just be ignored.At the same time,niche culture still encounters a series of development crisis yet,and those should be paid more attention.It shows that niche culture are closely linked to cultural creative industry in culture market,culture talents and culture policy,which shall contributed a lot to achieve coordinated development.Because of the discrepancy of theory and practice at this very moment,the research of niche culture needs to be reviewed and summarized preliminarily,and a holistic discuss should be started,instead of just lagging behind for a long time.Embarking from the current domestic niche culture phenomena,this thesis then starts the literature analysis,case studies and logical induction by multi-disciplinary thoughts and methods,say,Cultural Studies and culture communication studies.Eventually the research works out a basic theoretical framework of niche culture,hoping has a positive effect to the practical development and theoretical construction of contemporary niche culture in mainland China.