Impact Of Indian Television Programs On Sri Lankan Audience’s Daily Lifestyle Change

The contemporary mass media is becoming transnational and global. Through the communication literature media impact over audience can be varied one to another. The literature further shows that the measuring impact and influence of the media over audience very complicated. However, now communication research on media impact and influence has been becoming more systematic and scientific. This study consists of four major aims. Those are coming to address, what extent the local and Indian television programs influence on Sri Lankans daily life styles, and how far does the Indian telecast control over the Sri Lanka’s television channel and their programs. What are the cross-cultural impact on television programs over the Sri Lankan ethnic groups and what factors are more significantly influencing on the changing daily lifestyle due to Indian television programs.The main objective of the research is to investigate the impact of Indian television programs over the Sri Lankan audience daily lifestyles and its changing patterns from intercultural communication perspective. Accordingly this study highly focuses to examine the impact of Indian television programs. This study also investigates mostly affected mental and physical aspect of audience daily lifestyle due to watching Indian programs. It further identifies the role of the contemporary local media and their productions.The contemporary mass media research paid their attention on the impact of transnational and global media over their regional or global audience. This is the first study in Sri Lanka which targeted to examine the impact of Indian television programs over Sri Lankan audience daily life style.Data for this study were collected through the administration of a formal questionnaire in Sri Lanka. The sample size was 4131 by utilizing random sample method and the questionnaire was developed with 22 attribute measures of the impact on Sri Lankan audience’s daily lifestyle change due to expose to Indian television programs. The five point Likert scale was used for the questionnaire. Accordingly the conjoined study has been used Factor Analysis in order to explore possible audience profiles. Kruskal Wallis one-way ANOVA and Mann-Whitney U tests were conducted in order to test the hypothesis. Cronbach’s Alpha used to test the reliability of the study. Meanwhile, focus group discussions, letters, literature (news paper articles), case study methods have been employed to collect qualitative data for the study. The results derived from the combinations of aforesaid qualitative and constitutive method.The study found that Indian television programs are highly influented in changing of Sri Lankan television audience’s daily lifestyle in directly as well as indirectly rather than any other foreign television programs which targeted to Sri Lankan audience. Not only Indian imported television programs but also Sri Lankan productions have impact on Sri Lankan society in their lifestyle changing. It also found that most of Indian television programs are also influenced by western programs.Even though the audience has no much knowledge or completely understands about the languages which speak by the Indian television programs, and its audience acquires the meaning if subtitles are appear on the screen on their mother tongue or from the visuals. Most of Tamil speaking communities have to depend on Indian Tamil programs while Sinhalese mostly preferred to watch Indian Hindi and Sinhala dubbed programs. However most of Sinhala teledramas (soap operas) are Indian imitations. Majority of Sinhala and Muslim audience are enjoying with teledramas while most of Tamils enjoying teledramas and movies equally. Even though Sri Lankan government introduced new levy from July 2006 1 in order to control foreign low quality programs (except Indian Tamil productions) while allow award winning foreign productions and promote local high quality productions. There seems to be a trend to produce foreign (especially Indian) imitates in order to avoid this levy by some of the private television channels. This levy is still fail to help improving the quality of the local television programs. Meanwhile, some of the local television programs have negative effects on the local culture and audience daily lifestyle. Hence the control on imported programs alone would not help. The study has also been derived from island wide sample however due to the civic war in North and East areas in the country there were difficulties to reach all the areas planed early. However study has been taken every effort to collect data from aforesaid war on going North and East areas of the country.This study will guide for the new avenue on the field of the global and transnational media and the innovation of the life patterns due to exposing them.