Omnimedia Audiovisual Variety Shows Production And Youth Cultural Identity

As an essential label of Chinese contemporary mass culture,audiovisual variety shows integrates the two genres of traditional TV variety shows and Internet variety shows deeply in terms of their production mechanisms,platforms and concepts,shaping them into cultural products that are mutually interactive and interwoven online and offline extensively.This study focuses on the production and dissemination methods of China's online audiovisual variety shows.Through integration and analysis on the value orientations and cultural identity mechanisms of their target audiences-youth groups,it attempts to theorize the transition patterns of contemporary youth culture.In the Digital Media era,youth groups not only satisfy their own fundamental appeals to recreation and entertainment,but also achieve recognition of their self-identity and ethnic identity in culture immersion through the consumption of Internet culture.In this process,they will continuously deconstruct the meaning generation mechanism of cultural contexts to meet their individual needs.And along with the procedure in which they keep creating new meanings,they will reshape the entire youth culture discourse system.Given a comprehensive analysis of the variety shows' production features driven by technology availability,the study mainly applies qualitative research methods,such as textual analysis,in-depth interviews,and etc.It intends to explore the symbolic meaning and value attribution of their discourse system,and explain how the identity recognition system of contemporary youth operates in the Internet era.The study will also reveal the specific ways in which online cultural contexts shape contemporary youth culture,as well as depicting the "subsumptive","resistant","agreeable","converted","identified" dynamic presentation between youth culture and mainstream culture.Theoretically,the study carries out research chiefly according to Van Dijk's discourse theory in the media culture study framework.The main research contents includes those:(1)the investigation on how youth culture elements bring new styles and construct new expressions to variety shows at the level of content production;(2)the analyzation on how the Internet media environment mediates mass culture and promotes the realization of digital democracy by facilitating the formation of new connections between cultural contexts and consumers;(3)the exploration on how cultural capital and ideology "subsume" youth culture through variety shows,thus connecting youth culture to the mainstream discourse of "Chinese Dream".Empirically,the study regards variety shows as a full set of elaborately-coded cultural discourses,and its overall dissemination process as a specific discursive practice of recreating contemporary youth culture.On top of this,it develops a profound analysis of the interaction between " audiovisual variety shows" and "youth culture".The main conclusions of the research are as follows.Firstly,technological innovation has rendered youth culture the distinctive features of post-metaphorical and spatial bias,as well as established the unique discursive power of youth culture and greatly activated the democratization potential of youth culture.Secondly,the relationship between youth culture and the network information ecology is still based on the logical framework of consumerism.Its mass culture quality,which relies excessively on the entertainment symbol system,has led youth culture in the Internet era to become a depoliticized carnival,weakening the natural resistance property of youth culture.Last but not the least,conversation between mainstream ideology and contemporary youth culture demonstrates a trend towards dynamic balance between traditional culture and national discourse.Youth culture is increasingly becoming an indispensable and active factor of the mainstream cultural landscape in China.After analyzing,the author argues that the profile of youth culture has developed in line with the dual evolution trend--"icon-layfolk",which represents "concentration-democracy",in the context of digital democracy empowered by technological change and business models.Additionally,the article finds that youth groups have partly deconstructed the discourse of elite culture through participation,besides cultural practices such as "resistance","subsumption" and etc.In these practices,they have also denied the dominant position of elite culture in the cultural field,formed a self-reflection mechanism and expressed a desire to return to the mainstream.As youth culture becomes the mainstream in mass culture,it has become an indisputable fact that the public advocates "youthfulness".Considering commercial capital,aesthetic culture,educational concept,as well as political proposition,the production of audiovisual variety shows is supposed to not just cater for the age trend of youth culture in form,but form a creative research system in ideology,which comes into existence with leading and communicating with youth culture.