The Socialization Of Contemporary Chinese Documentary

Presently, the Chinese documentary is getting into a new stage of marketization and industrialization, driven by national cultural strategy police to develop the cultural industry and cultural soft power. The commercial value of Internet to promote documentary industry is getting more and more attention. This thesis aims to investigate the influence of the Internet new media to the development of Chinese documentary.In most previous studies, the issue is discussed on the basis of industrial and economic interest. This thesis, instead of concentrating on how to make the documentary industry bigger and stronger, focuses on the perspective of the political economics of communication, discussing whether the Internet could bring diversification, democratic participation and independent consumption of documentary. Opponent to the media centrism and technology determinism, the study considers the Internet as not only a technical force, but an influential factor limited by the nation, market and professional forces.In terms of the methodology, the study adopts archival research, field observation and case study of the documentary-related websites, online community and network discourse, also including author’s field investigation on the documentary network. With a thick description of Chinese documentaries’network communication, the study presents the theoretic interpretations.Chapter1is an introduction for the whole narrative of the thesis. The question consciousness from the research background, the logical start points and the research methods are listed.Chapter2traces the history of Chinese documentary production in four historical stages from the new period, which is examined with the perspective of the state and market. On the basis of understanding traditional documentary production pattern, this part compares it with the documentary production and communication on the Internet.Chapter3studies the documentary production entities, programs and contents under the Internet context. Studies suggest that the new technology has generalized the main documentary production body, which, as a result, broke the barriers of the image production in the system. However, the network media did not make great impact on the mainstream documentary production pattern.The commercial video website is getting into documentary production and opening documentary channel, which indicates the public’s demands on increasing social influence and bearing social responsibility. In terms of content. the documentaries popular on the Internet have the new orientation of timeliness, fragmentation and entertainment.Chapter4studies the communication of documentary film on the Internet. First, it analyses the digital copyright of film and television works, and examines the cooperation copyright of the network video and documentary. Second, it investigates the business for the documentary on the Internet, the study finds that the online documentary released by commercial operation of the long tail is uncertain, especially risky for the unofficial production. Word-of-mouth marketing for blogs is becoming a new way of business, but commercial and political power can limit technology liberation. Finally, this part investigates documentary in the network communities, concluding the documentary online discourse are still weak but in growth.Chapter5discusses the policy environment of online documentary in China. Since Internet entered Chinese society, it has showed many impacts on the traditional media pattern, transmission order and ideology safety. China has adopted a series of regulatory policies on infrastructure, service and content, trying to constrain the Internet into the traditional media management system. This chapter examines how the public policy deals with the new media technology, analyses the motive and method of regulation.The conclusion summarizes the Internet’s impact on the development of documentary, and points out the insufficiency and the further study.