| Popis: |
This chapter examines how discourses on television and film became intertwined with the three afore-mentioned theories in the context of a major reassemblage of transmedia consumer culture driven by the diffusion of television. In so doing, it illuminates how discourses on the two media defined television viewers as the subjects of “consumer life democracy” and cinema audiences as the subjects of “modern political democracy”—a concept related to the work of Maruyama Masao, Ōtsuka Hisao, and other influential intellectuals of so-called postwar democracy (sengo minshu-shugi) in the 1950s. These subjects can be seen as different and contested forms of “the masses” in the postwar Japanese context in which public antipathy to war and systemic power—typically articulated in discussion of mass society, mass culture, and mass communication—coexisted with Japan’s remarkable economic growth, itself sustained by the unbalanced division of labor between the male-centered workplace and the female-and-television-centered home. As these configurations were taking place, the diffusion of television and other new forms of leisure precipitated a reassembling of transmedia consumer culture, which significantly altered cinema’s position within the whole of the media ecology. This chapter also foregrounds how throughout this period of change regional and gender issues contained the potential to unsettle the existing social norms. |
