Audience Studies: A Japanese Perspective (Routledge Advances in Internationalizing Media Studies) - Softcover

Takahashi, Toshie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415896584 ISBN 13: 9780415896580

Publisher: Routledge, 2011

Synopsis

This book theorizes the role of media and ICT in today’s media-rich global environment and introduces a new argument of audience complexity in an accessible and lively fashion. Based on an ethnography of Japanese engagement with media and ICT in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, Takahashi offers a non-Western case study of some of the world’s most advanced ICT users. Integrating non-Western and Western traditions in the social sciences, the book presents a productive new framework for understanding the complex, diverse, and dynamic nature of media audiences in the context of globalization and social change brought on by new media and information technologies. A significant contribution to the ‘internationalisation’ of media studies movement now underway, the book will demonstrate (1) the multiple dimensions of audience engagement; (2) the transformation of the notion of uchi (Japanese social groups) in a media-rich environment; and (3) the role of media and ICT in the process of self-creation. The study considers the future of a Japanese society caught in the currents of globalization and contemporary debates of universalism and cultural specificity, while at the same time offering a view of globalization from a Japanese perspective.

About this title

About the Author

Toshie Takahashi is Associate Professor, Department of Communication and Media Studies, Rikkyo University, Japan.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0415896584
• ISBN 13: 9780415896580
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 250