Wine Culture In Mass Media And Audiences’ Cognition Research

Today, wine as a representative of western culture exceeds the range of the category ofmerchandise, and wine culture have been spread extensively through mass media. As thepoint of symbol, wine culture can be divided in icon, index and symbolic. At the point ofencoding/decoding, the mass communication is a process that the mass media encode thecontent to the receivers and make them understand the symbols.Choosing Chongqing Economic Times, Chongqing Evening News and CCTV as themedia samples, the thesis analyzes the wine culture in typical of samples from newspaper andtelevision advertising. With the methods of questionnaire and interview, the thesis also canfind out how the audience looks like the wine culture. At last, the thesis will compare wineculture in mass media and audience’s mind, and find the relevance.Issues of Chongqing Economic Times “Wine Weekly” can be parted for five areas, whichare “history”,“development”,“etiquette”,“knowledge”, and “experience”.“Development”and “knowledge” are the most notable ones. High frequency of “knowledge” referred in thereports is on the one hand, there is well studied in wine culture and, on the other, knowledgehas positive relationship with the audience. The historical feature of western culture isprofoundly manifested in the reports about “history”, and the report about “etiquette” islimited to drink.The thesis use symbolic methods to analyze the representative samples from the chosenmedia, and find out that wine culture was represented in news report by language and graphicsymbols, however it was represented in TV advertising combining language and non-languagesymbolic meaning which is better manifestation of wine culture. The wine culture is thesymbol of western culture, especially French culture which has long history, pursuing thequality of health life and the etiquette of tasting wine.During the90questionnaires and interviews, it is shown there is difference betweenaudiences’ concerns and representative samples from the media, and audiences had a vagueknowledge of wine culture. In respondents’ mind, wine is premier product. The idea wascaused by their own knowledge and experiences. And the mass media is not the decisive force.However, audiences learn the right way to taste wine through the mass media. In general,audience has the perceptual knowledge of wine culture that accord with what the mass media show.Different audiences have their own preferences and knowledge structure, which makesthem have different understanding in one sign. In the meanwhile, the mass media spread wineculture must considering the society environment and cultural background.