Quality TV

The term ‘Quality TV’ to me is very vague. Quality TV is simply defined as a genre or style of television programming that they argue is of higher quality, due to its subject matter, style, or content.

In television industry, we usually frequently ‘quality’ of programming with ‘awards’. These award ceremonies usually are what many use to measure the success and ‘quality’ of programs. The interesting point is that for most awards, the viewers do not get to select the winner. The winner is typically chosen by the so-called ‘experts’. But how much can we trust the ‘experts’ opinions when there seem to be a lot of times when the audience disagrees with the result of the nominated awards?

Therefore, it is arguable what standard of measurement we use to dictate what is and what is not considered ‘quality’. I believe such decision involves a high degree of personal judgement. Some may believe that news agents such as CNN and BBC are quality TV because they feed us information we need to know in daily life, but it is also evident that news agents can occasionally be biased and report inaccurate information that misleads the audience. Therefore my personal value that lies within me would say that these channels are not quality TV.

As a result, it seems that in order to determine what quality TV is, it requires more personal value rather than what the programs have to offer.

Propaganda techniques in advertising

As an advertising student, I decided to talk a little bit about advertising and television in this blog. The topic to be discussed is TV commercial and the propaganda techniques they use in production. Today’s television companies are using many different types of propaganda techniques to get the viewer’s attention and persuade them into purchasing their products. Propaganda is a persuasive tool used in advertising to get a person to become interested in a product.

A source argues that deceptive advertising in the form of exaggeration is generally accepted to allow producers to remain competitive in the free market.

From the video, Domino Pizza spent a fortune making this commercial. A lot of efforts and all sort of equipments were put in place to produce the most appealing and mouth-watering pizza. Personally, I think that the commercial is exaggerated to a degree that it could be misleading, I never once had a Domino  pizza that looks exactly like the one in their commercial.

However, it cannot be concluded that the ad is totally deceptive when the pizza and all ingredients are real. Domin

29/08 Submission: My Best Four

Hi Brian, this is the list of my best four blogs for assessment. Thank you.

1. The soft power of television: ‘Korean Wave’ and drama-theme tours

2. Made possible by the power of fandom: Case study ‘We give a Chuck’

3. Cultural Imperialism: ‘Meteor Garden’ and its invasion across Asia

4. Desperate Housewives – Television portrayal of gender role identity and family crisis

Soft Power of Television: ‘Korean Wave’ and Drama Tours

This blog will explore the capability soft power of Korean television dramas and how the Koreans adopted different marketing strategies to make use of the increasingly popular Korean Wave.

A study by Youmans (2009) proposed the concept of soft power as how a country uses non-coercive techniques to effect change in the behavior of other countries. Powerful countries can thus accomplish objectives without resorting to physical force or threat. International broadcasting is one of the examples of soft power in practice.

However, he also suggested that it is depending on the audience and how willing they to receive and interpret the aspiration power the sending country is trying to propose. But if we are talking about Korean Wave here, it seems to me that audience all over Asia has been extremely receptive to that.

Korean dramas started to penetrate Asia in 1997, achieving mainstream success in Japan, China, and Southeast Asia. Moreover, Korean Pop Culture is rapidly becoming an export success for Korean. Another study defined ‘Korean Wave,’ as a as the Korean pop culture’s attraction in the outside of Korean territory. The cultures are carried out by different media genre such as television dramas, films, music, and online games.

In this case, the government plays a big part in the success of the Korean invasion in Asia. The phenomena of Korean Wave is the imaging building at the national level in the new format which tie in the media industry. Since 2005 the government granted organisations that introduce Korean culture overseas with millions of dollars with a hope to expand Korea’s culture abroad along with cultural exports and tourism. More and more Korean dramas go international which resulted in an increasing number of tourists flooding into Korea. A source indicates that South Korea enjoyed income from merchandise, film and TV program exports and tourism by $US1.8 billion in 2008 It also affects in the increasing number of foreign tourists and 67% of the tourists visited Korean due to Korean Wave.

As K-Pop is becoming more popular, the Koreas are smart enough to make use of the effect of it and therefore establish many cultural marketing strategy targeting TV drams fans. Due to the tourist influx to Korea, the new business is found, ‘Korean Drama Tours.  The tours offer drama-hungry fanatics a chance to visit their favourite drama’s filming location. And as mentioned earlier, this is truly a national matter, Korean Tourism Organization helps to promote drama tour business by having the whole list of different drama tour package on its official tourism website.

Web interface of visitkorea.or.kr

Take a popular drama ‘Winter Sonata’ for instance.

All-time favourite "Winter Sonata"

In order to attract more tourists to Nami Island where the drama was filmed, a life-size brass statue of the actor and actress, Bae Yong Jun and Choi Ji Woo was made as one of the tourist destinations (see pictures below).

A statue dedicated to the drama "Winter Sonata" on Nami Island

Fan enjoying her time with the statue

In conclusion, like it or not, Korea seems to have a strong ‘soft power’ in the Asian broadcasting industry and demonstrates an increasing level of hegemony of the Korean cultural power.

Made possible by the power of fandom: Case study “We give a Chuck”

Fan culture has been around since god knows when. However, convergence culture nowadays allows people all around the world who share the same interest to come together a lot easier due to technological advancement such as internet. Therefore fan culture communities are not limited to geographical space.

Henry Jenkins (2008) represents media fans in is his study as active producers and skilled manipulators of program meanings, as nomadic poachers constructing their own culture from borrowed materials, as an alternative social community defined through its cultural preferences and consumption practices.

So in this post I want to explore the power of fandom through an example of how fans have gone to save the show they love through several media channels. The issues raised by fans have consequences not only for fan culture but also for program production. I found it very interesting that many TV shows that were brought back to air by the power of fandom.

The relationship between fans and producers predates the digital age. Fan activities have many times at least indirectly impacted future of the show. One of the classic exmaples is Star Trek fandom: how Trekkies first saved the show from cancellation and then kept it alive during the wilderness decade between the demise of the original series in 1969 and the release of the first feature film in 1979.

Another interesting example for the current one in digital era is “We give a Chuck” publicity campaigns, trying to urge the producer to keep airing the show. In April 2011, Chuck fans realized that their favourite series was going to be extinct, therefore decided to do something to get the TV station and producer’s attention in order to save the show.

Web interface of wegiveachuck.com

Wegiveachuck.com was created by Chuck’s fans to purposely get Chuck Season 5 back. The fans admitted that they have become attached to these characters and the wonderful actors who portray them. The website is the mean of communication among fans and also contains a series of show-saving strategies of how to get Chuck back. The fans can then participate in Chuck’s social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter to make their voices heard.

But what I found most fascinating is the Subway Footlong campaign. As crazy as it might sound, a hundred of fans in American paraded to a subway store and purchased footlong sandwiches from Chuck product-placement sponsor Subway and wrote letters in the hopes that both the station and Subway would see that fan loyalty would translate to advertising dollars (watch the video below!).

 

A study done by Pearson (2010) inserted that digital revolution has had an impact over fandom. It empowers, disempowers, and blurs the line between producer and audience.

The example of Chuck’s bring-back-the-show campaign reveals how digital revolution has made fan communities more assessable and acts as a tool to fans/audience participation. At the same time, fans also have become active producers. In this case, Chuck’s fans used wegiveachuck.com as a main source of power then branches out to social media sites, and lastly to an unpredictable strategy like the Footlong Campaign. The power of fans definitely has a big impact of show production and producer’s decisions.

Consequently, the efforts of Chuck’s fans will be paid off, Chuck Season 5 is on its way!

Cultural Imperialism: ‘Meteor Garden’ and its invasion across Asia

In Week 4 tutorial, we have brainstormed vocabularies that are relevant to TV culture context. There are some key words that really interest me such as globalization, transnationalism, cultural imperialism and cultural transportation. Therefore, today’s blog post will be discussed about TV show as a form of cultural imperialism. Meteor Garden is a good example of how TV show is carrying a new transnational youth identities across Asia.

Meteor Garden is a Taiwanese live-action show based on Japanese manga series, Hana Yori Dango (Boys Over Flower). It is basically an Asian version of Cinderella story that depicts the romance between the rich and the poor. The show became a smash success in Asia during the early 2000s and has made its way to captivate fans across Asian countries such as in Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines.

Original Japanese Manga (above) and Taiwanese TV series (below) versions of 'Meteor Garden'

I was amazed by the fact that the story is originated from Japan, but skilfully made to drama form by Taiwanese production and marketing before it could finally invade youth culture of the rest of East and South East Asia.

In a way, such circumstance can help TV audience in different countries to envision cultural alignment and shared experience of Asian community. However, it can also invade the existing cultures in the country where the show is exporting to. The ban of Meteor Garden is a good example.

Meteor Garden was banned by the Chinese government after a couple episodes aired due to its “tendency to mislead teenagers”. They claimed that the television series promoted “decadently luxurious life” and advocated “money worship” by showing girls in glamour with Gucci bags while the boys drive flashy BMWs. The example demonstrated that TV shows could be used as tools to spread cultural value, which in this case would be relationships, fashions, money and fame. Therefore, audience with unstable values can easily be influenced by those values portrayed in media.

I believe that TV shows can help to reinforce existing beliefs and values as well as introduce new cultural conventions to the society. As popular cultural flows have become more regular nowadays, TV shows are not only able activate cultural exchange, but also to invade the existing cultures.

So why do we love reality TV?

For the past decades, there has been an increasing number of reality shows on television and is currently the most popular television genre in Western societies. Reality television is a genre of television programming that presents unscripted situations and usually features ordinary people instead of professional actors.

The genre is generally seen as consisting of various sub-types including game shows (e.g. American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, surveillance shows (e.g. Big Brother), competitions (e.g. Survivor, Master Chef), dating and others.

Now I will disclose four major reasons why viewers love reality TV.

1. Sense of Belonging

Reality show has an ability to bring reality closer to viewers. It engages with the audience and makes them feel like being part of the action. The audience is able to promote, expel or bring back participants by using technology such as texting and internet. This makes them to feel included and allow them to feel important to be part of every decision made in the show.

2. Excitement

As the story narratives are not scripted like other dramas, it is often unpredictable and that provides audience with a sense of excitement.

3. Fulfill individual’s curiosity

Reality shows satisfy the curiosity have about others. Such shows can serve the irresistible curiosity of audience to know, about other people’s personal lives and what happens behind closed doors.

4. Pleasure

Ultimately, reality TV delivers joy and pleasure to viewers. Some pleasures of audience come from seeing participants do well. However, for a lot of people, pleasure comes from watching people failing and being humiliated. And many reality shows, the humiliation of the contestant is a selling point for the program.

Take a popular show ‘Fear Factor’ as an example. Viewers can enjoy watching participants being humiliated by any imaginable ways. The contestants are often forced to eat the sexual organs of animals, various live and dead bugs, and involve in other disgusting activities the producers dreamt up.

Fear Factor: Live spider eating

However, a research study done by Cohen, Weimann & Bar-Sinai (2009) argued that as much as producers assume that watching humiliation increases excitement of the shows, research participants believe that humiliation increases enjoyment decreases.

Again, it links back to the previous point of ‘fulfilling curiosity’. Viewers would wonder, when watching Fear Factor, if the contestant will survive after eating a ton of live cockroaches, and how would they deal with difficult situations that do not often occur in real life.

There are several reasons why people love reality TV, but for me the major reason would be that it fulfils curiosity of viewers.

Will broadcast TV die out and be replaced by streaming TV?

It is undeniable that Internet plays an important role in everyday life in this century. However, it is still debatable whether broadcast TV will die out completely and be replaced by internet streaming TV.

Streaming TV provides viewers with an absolute convenience to watch any programs at any time of the day. There are thousands of movies, shows and programs to choose from at a fairly low price. The evident shows that online video usage in USA has continued grow in 2011 as Americans streamed more than 15 billion videos, up 2.2% from an all-time high of 14.7 billion streams a month.

Nevertheless, the main disadvantage of streaming TV would be that the transmission relies pretty much on internet connection that a lot of time can be inconsistent. Streaming TV would be more popular in certain countries like American where internet is cheap and fast, Australia is definitely not the case.

Another source inserted that each month, U.S. consumers spent nearly 159 hours viewing TV in their homes, 4.5 hours viewing Internet video and more than 4 hours watching video on mobile devices. Therefore, it is clear that majority of consumers still prefers broadcast TV over streaming.

I believe that traditional TV remains popular due to its ability to bring a big group of people together. It provides the audience with a sense of community and belonging (I can’t imagine myself watching a program with my family on a 15-inch display). In contrast, internet often isolate people from each another rather than bring them together.

 

Here are some broadcast networks you can check out:

ABC

http://abc.go.com/

ABC News

http://abcnews.go.com

NBC

http://www.nbc.com/

The CW

http://www.cwtv.com

 

Desperate Housewives – Television portrayal of gender role identity and family crisis

Desperate Housewives is one of the first drama series I watched. The story is about the secret lives of five housewives who live in the suburbs of America on Wisteria Lane and each family has their own ‘dirty little secret’ and problems to deal with. Desperate Housewives clearly portrays the gender role identity of housewives ranges from a neat mother, a gold digger, to a bossy wife. It might seem to be just another drama that reinforces sexual, racial and gender stereotypes on the surface, but if we look at it closely, the show successfully depicts a variety of problems within families existing in a modern American family.

Television used a variety of domestic comedies to explore the role of suburban housewives. The show makes us wonder what an ‘ideal’ woman looks like. Every household in Wisteria Lane presents a metaphor for the modern day woman’s gender identity crisis.

This blog will analyse two housewife characters on the street; Gabrielle Solis and Lynette Scavo, to represent the depiction of gender role identity crisis presented in the show.

Gabrielle Solis with her husband and boyfriend

Gabrielle Solis, a former model, is seen as the most glamorous, seductive, manipulative and she succeeds by using her body. The character makes use of her perfect body to fulfill career aspirations as well as achieving personal goal; to marry a rich man as she strongly believes money can buy everything including happiness. She is a stay-at-home housewife who loves herself so much that she does not want to have children. In contrast to the stereotype of Western woman being independent, Gabrielle still want a man and need a relationship for emotional reasons as well as financial or security.

Lynette Scavo in a work uniform taking care of her baby

As opposed to Gabrille’s fantasy character, Lynette Scavo seems to be more realistic. The character describes the struggle between two different roles; a workaholic and a traditional mum. The Scavo’s is a middle class American family in which mother has to work outside as well as take care of domestic matters. A study suggested that Lynette represents a realistic picture of modern day American mum who is trying to balance her work and family life of three children. Therefore the characters of Gabrielle and Lynette introduce entirely different gender role of modern day’s housewives.

To answer to the previous question ‘what does an ideal woman looks like?’, I would say there is none. There is no such thing as a perfect housewife or perfect family. Every family has flaws and is unique with its own way. I believe a drama series like Desperate Housewives can make positive impact on society because the drama pinpoints several gender role problems we often come across in family.  It is something that we can look back to ourselves as it might be a reflection of our own family or self. That, for me, is what makes Desperate Housewives unique and interesting as something to study.