On The Evolution Of Viewing Space Since The 1990s

In the late 1980s, the consumerism trend of China’s social culture has quietly come into being, which became increasingly popular after its prosperity from the 1990s to the beginning of the new century. At the same time, the emergent technology with the Internet and digitalization as the core also emerged in the mainland of China in the late 1990s. The rapid-growing technological achievements have been ready to thrive from the beginning of the new century, which would further subvert the traditional physical time and space of social existence and communication, and create an extended cyberspace with digitalized bit as the basic model. Since the 1990s, in order to meet the needs of the demand of consumer society for choosing the public viewing, theaters in the traditional mainstream of viewing space began the reengineering revolution after the fierce external competition and internal disorder of management at the beginning of the century. As the same time as the theater revolution is catering to the booming consumerism trend, digital devices and the Internet technology began to intrude violently into the public living space, quickly spread to the arts and cultural consumption field, and quietly come into the hinterland in depth of the public viewing. Afterwards, they gradually formed a media viewing space, which would become an equal with traditional theater space. Accompanied by this situation, other public or private cultural activities places apart from cinema and digital media outside the viewing space, such as the living room television, video halls, open spaces, car parks and so on, as a type of marginal viewing field derived from outside the theater, in the social transformation and the impact of technology replacement are catering to meeting the needs of the viewing market by conscious innovation, or are benefit from government support and survive to playing political roles, or are limited by lagging technology and gradually dying out quietly. They are interpreting the development prospect in the changing era.Placed into the context of the consumer society and the digital existence era, the market reconstruction of traditional theater space and the transformation into media of the viewing space have become the epitome of the development of the viewing space evolution since the 90s of the 20th century. According to the reconstructed theater viewing practice, the public deeply inspired by consumerism culture are constructed by variation on occupying of economic and cultural capital. Therefore, movie theatres turned their role from open public territory of citizens to places that different class are finding their identities and belongings of conception of value, from popular group entertainment to capital experience of minority. On the contrary, movie viewing space shaped by digital media broke the bond of concrete geographical space through manifestation of characteristic liberty, "destructively" deconstructed, and made it transform from watching in theatres of minority people to popular experience of multiple platform. These two kinds of trends on movie viewing due to space alternation, not only displayed the trend of preference choice on space of mass, but also reflected symptoms of social culture and changing of popular way of life and conception of value.This article, focuses on traditional main-stream movie theatre space and sprouting digital media space of the new age, regarding social historical background of transformation and reforming. This article researches deeply into the social problem on occupation of social resource and owning of discourse power of different class under the transformation of viewing space. This paper consists of three parts:The first part describes the phenomenon of diversity on viewing space of Chinese mainland in early 1990s, and historical dilemma of movie theatres. The second part analyzes the cultural problems of the society by explaining the reconstruction of movie theatre space and construction of aspects of viewing right in the consumption society. The third part researches viewing space’s transformation to digital media and the following revolution of aesthetic movie viewing and deconstruction of movie viewing rights.