An Interpretation Of Mass Culture And Metropolitan Newspaper

To understand how the mass culture affect and be expressed through the metropolitan newspaper, both of them are studied in this thesis.As a culture model, the mass culture has already been the subject of modern culture and plays the most vital role. Actually the concept of mass culture is really controversial in both theory research and practice, as a result, culture researchers also gave different interpretations of mass culture in different periods. At the very beginning of the industrial ages, it was considered as vulgar culture representing the bottom of the society. After that, it became cultural commodity which were produced, reproduced, and circulated in large scale by cultural industry operators. Then, mass culture turned into a widespread lifestyle of symbol consumption shaped by the social structure. Finally, it transformed into a kind of universal and steady cultural pattern.Professor Jin Yuanpu, who had specifically studied the situation of Chinese modern culture, pointed out that, the mass communication we were discussing nowadays was a designated conception. It mainly referred to the modern cultural pattern which rose from modern cities, closely related to great industry and produced through globalized modern media especially the electronic media. Being in consumption ages, it gave consuming awareness the priority to direct the public in a fashionable way. In other words, mass culture was a cultural pattern which suited the industrial civilization and urban society.As a special cultural pattern, the visual impact, technology standard, large-quantity reproduction, commercial profit, public and everyday character, entertainment as well as other characteristics of mass culture had remarkably affected the style and ultimately laid a foundation of the metropolitan newspaper.Following the market discipline, the metropolitan newspaper in China faced and served the citizens class. Meanwhile, it was oriented by the city citizens' needs. It not only supplied information such as current political news, financial news, but also highlighted the functional information concerning people's daily lives as well as recreational news. Besides those ones directly named as "metropolitan newspaper", times, morning papers, evening news and other names were also used to differ from official paper and trade paper. Since Chongqing Evening News is metropolitan newspaper and related to mass media and mass culture closely, content analysis and text analysis are used in this thesis to discuss how the mass culture affected the newspapering and editing of and be expressed through this paper, aiming to improve the metropolitan cultural construction under the circumstances of mass culture.In that case, researches and study could be of highly realistic and practical significance.