Television Watching And Everyday Life In Liucun

In the modern transformation, China’s rural community is being involved in the industrialization and urbanization process in the form of decadency with villages being emptied and young adults being detached from the villages. Meanwhile, the public life in the rural area has undergone tremendous changes. The traditional public leisure and entertainment in the countryside are declining and even fading away with the entry and domination of television. What’s the impact of television on the daily life of the villagers? This is the research theme of the dissertation which will be discussed in the following sections:The first chapter describes the social and media changes in Liu Village, an ordinary village in the Jianghan Plain in nearly60years. We could see that the entry and domination of television, on the one hand, brings the decadence of the public life in the village, both in culture and recreation. On the other hand, television plays a significant role in the reconstruction of the villagers’daily life and the meaning world by means of setting up a path to the outside world.Chapter II investigates the television viewing in the context of Liu villagers’daily life. Firstly, a description presents the memory of their television life in nearly30years. Secondly, pictures an ordinary day of the villagers in the context of television viewing. After that, a specific discussion is elicited on the relevancy of the experience of the villagers’TV viewing and their self-construction.Chapter III studies the relevance between TV viewing and gender, which will result in different meanings for male and female. The research found that men like to watch news programs to enhance their cultural capital in the village and their gender identity in the family relations; while women prefer family drama, that is also relevant with their identity in their families and the village, for the TV watching can be a source of concept on family relations, filial piety and the gender relations. Furthermore, it can also play its role of empowerment.The fourth chapter discusses TV and the villagers’imagination about the sense of locality and the country. Social changes and decline of public cultural lives lead to the lack of sense of locality in Liucun’s villagers. Whereas with local rural TV they weakly rebuild this sense. During the process of social changes the concept of country is extracted from the village. It is TV that connects the villagers and the distant country. Through TV Liucun’s villagers share the idea of country, and the country gets involved into the villagers’daily life and political life.This research, in a "home anthropology" category, mainly employs methods of experience, participant observation and depth interviews, while in writing, a narrative method is applied to the illustration of theory. The meaning of daily life is a process of continuous construction without a final answer. However, the researcher, through constant conversion of perspective, may have excavated, relatively, part of the real in the real world.