Description From Multi-Dimension:Mass Media And The Construction Of City Images

The building and promotion of city image has become a main reflection of a city’s soft power, with the acceleration of urbanization of China in the past three decades. How to motive and use other related strengths to work on building city image and resolve the problems occurred during the promotion have become a key issue in a city’s development. This thesis, in a way of media representation, is to examine and reflect China’s urbanization, sort out and reposition the relationship between city and media, so as to provide with a viable and referential city image propagation system.Chapter1sorts out the relations between mass media and city image in different time backgrounds, which includes the following stages:1949-1978in revolution context,1978-1992in reform and open-up policy context, and1992-2012in market economy context.Chapter2discusses the media strategy for the formation of city images, integrating the theory of city marketing and the propagation knowledge of empirical school. It raises the background of China’s city marketing, which started from1990s’. In the trading of land between the government and estate developers, the funding of China’s urbanization to rebuild city images was accumulated. It quotes the concepts of city branding and marketing, enumerating examples of different times, cities and medium, elucidating each crucial factor in city branding, and raises the issue that Chinese cities rely too much on the media in building their images, while ignore the cultivation of the spirit and culture inside.Chapter3discusses mass media’s Dos and Don’ts in the construction of social recognition. Through typical examples, elucidates the guiding influence to the media by political factors and the government’s intention, and narrates the impact to the process of city image’s dissemination, rendered by the fortune worship, popular culture and modern urban drama.Chapter4illuminates the portray of "The Others" made by the media, through three different hierarchies of new immigrants, sexual workers and unemployed people, analyzing the mass media’s illustrations of "The Others" and the important connections between the media’s word expressions and the social states and attribute of "The Others". The government media tends to display the positive side and cover the negative aspects, while the market media is more likely to discover the true life of "The Others". On certain purpose, the truth displayed by the media is different from the objective real truth; however, just because of this, it becomes so diverse and energetic.Based on the forth chapters, the fiifth chapter elucidates "urban disease" symptoms and causes, examinating western countries experiences in handling "urban disease". It illustrates how to form ideal city images by the three aspects of city’s hardware construction, city marketing and public communication, and how to build a penetrable city through "connection","communication" and "sharing". During this process, government will be in the leading position, while the public media acts as a participant.In conclusion, no matter for the city image or the media, the root is always the profound culture. To raise problems is not to criticize, but to change it better. Cities should face the development dilemmas honestly. This article emphasizes how to enhance city development, create ideal city image and how public communication grows into a public service and influences the communication of city construction.