Shanghai Urban Community Construction Of Media

With the globalization of world economy and the influence of the expansion of mass media and comsutnption culture on the local community, the actions to rebuild "local sense" spread across the world. It’s been more and more frequently for people to look for origins of their indentity in regional culture. With Shanghai’s rise to a global metropolis, the media often orchestrate a collective imagination of "Shanghainese" in recent years. Shanghai "11.15" Fire is a very typical and far-reaching case.This paper analyses newspaper and internet coverages on Shanghai "11.15" Fire. Using "city community" as the basic concept, and text analysis, discourse analysis, archival study and in-depth interview as methods, the paper tries to describe and elaborate how media constructed Shanghai city community after the disaster. The paper argues that the media not only helped to initiate the "Touqi" memoriam for the victims by construing the city community which is different from nation-states community, but also created a "New Shanghai" by facilitating the collective memory of the fire and the memoriam. However, the Shanghai city community, constructed by the media, still has its limitations, the meaning of which has undergone and will continue to undergo changes.