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

By Toshie Takahashi and Takahashi Toshie

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415800137
• ISBN13: 9780415800136
• Release Date: August 2009
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 236 Pages
• Weight: 1.12 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"