Are We "Shore" We Know What They Think About Us?

The sexualization and controversial subject matters displayed in American mainstream media is hardly cause for surprise nowadays. The popularity among young adults of Jersey Shore (a television series that follows the day-to-day lives of eight Italian-American's and their debaucherous exploits), which broadcasts adult content in a somewhat censored style, provides the basis for this research. By exposing 10 Chinese university students to this kind of controversial media content I explore how these individuals perceive American culture, how pleasure is associated with watching reality TV programs, how identity is constructed in the era of globalization, and how being exposed to different, scandalous media texts can affect the perceptions of these individuals in regard to the American way of life. Theoretically, this inquiry is rooted in audience studies, which argues for active engagement between viewers and the text. This study is also situated within a framework using Appadurai's notion of mediascapes as a means to analyze popular culture and how these mediascapes in turn influence changes of an individuals ideoscapes and how they understand the local and global while studying the connection between the imagination and globalization. Through a combination of in-depth interviews, focus groups, and text-in-action (Wood,2005), I discovered that pleasure is derived from media texts for a multitude of reasons, including authenticity, derision, fantasy, irony, and superiority. Furthermore, Chinese university students use mediascapes to fabricate an imagined world about American culture, which in turn affects their ideoscapes, since they believe that the "American Dream" is still propagated through numerous media texts, and is thus still attainable for all Americans.