Technology adoption and content consumption in Chinese television: local city, national city, global city

Abstract

Advances in media technologies allow people to restructure their relations across a broad range of time and space. As a result, modern communities are organized on local, national, and global bases. These communities are sustained and developed by media technologies their members adopt and characteristic media contents they consume. This article explores the relations between technology adoption, content consumption, and modern communities in Chinese television. The results indicate that the space-biased feature of television is enhanced by a combination of space-biased technologies and ritualized contents (i.e., drama and popular entertainment). Meanwhile, the over-emphasized space-biased feature is counterbalanced by a combination of time-biased technologies and instrumental contents (i.e., knowledge/information programs). Of more importance, the study supports three development trajectories of modern communities and media: 1) the larger scale the community has, the more the community relies on media to organize and coordinate; 2) the larger scale the community has, the less the community is tied to the traditional sources; and 3) the larger scale the community has, the less the community has shared cultural practices.