Media Consumption and Everyday Life in Asia

This book explores people’s everyday experience of the media in Asian countries in confrontation with huge social change and transition and the need to understand this phenomenon as it intersects with the media. It argues for the centrality of the media to Asian transformations in the era of globalization. The profusion of the media today, with new imaginations, new choices and contradictions, generates a critical condition for reflexivity engaging everyday people to have a resource for the learning of self, culture and society in a new light. Media culture is creating new connections, new desires and threats, and the identities of people are being reworked at individual, national, regional and global levels. Within historically specific social conditions and contexts of the everyday, the chapters seek to provide a diversity of experiences and understandings of the place of the media in different Asian locations. This book considers the emerging consequences of media consumption in people’s everyday life at a time when the political, socio-economic and cultural forces by which the media operate are rapidly globalizing in Asia.

"The essays are presented in three parts: media globalization and everyday life, Asian regional media and transnational consumption, and everyday cultural practices and identity. They offer new and grounded explorations of some of the important themes that have recently engaged scholars of global media and culture, and together they constitute an exciting and important contribution to the field."--R. Harindranath, Asian Journal of Communication, Vol. 20, No. 4, December 2010

Youna Kim is Associate Professor of Global Communications at the American University of Paris and is the author of Women, Television and Everyday Life in Korea: Journeys of Hope (Routledge, 2005).