A Study On Urban Reading Culture From The Perspective Of Consumer Society

Paper-medium reading is losing its dominance in reading ecology, for great impacts from the flourishing new media. So the urban reading culture is on its restructure internally and suffers from the discipline and refactoring from the "profound consumer society"externally. Both of them contribute to the transition of urban reading culture. As its establishment in2004, Shanghai Book Fair sounded the horn of urban reading culture’s transition. In the past10years, it witnessed how the urban reading culture gradually evolved to spectacle, visualization and symbolic. In turn, the grand reading carnival of Shanghai Book Fair has prompted the consumeristic urban reading culture. Therefore, the history of Shanghai Book Fair can stand for the rise and development of consumeristic urban reading culture in some way.This paper tries to analysis the10years of development of Shanghai Book Fair under the background of consumer society. The multi-dimensional perspective of this paper is based on Spectacle Society theory, Visual Culture theory, Symbolic Consumption theory, Space theory, Globalization theory, and so on. It tries to find out the development mechanism of Shanghai Book Fair and outline the trajectory in which urban reading culture turns to be consumeristic. In the future development, Shanghai Book Fair should make more efforts on the elimination of consumeristic reading culture and lead to the culture full of essential meaning so that the urban citizens can enjoy the achievement of wisdom, the training of thinking and the nourishment of humanistic spirit.In this paper, we use the methods such as data analysis, document study, interview, fieldwork and interdisciplinary research, extracting out a large amount of persuasive materials which would lay a solid foundation for the further research on Shanghai Book Fair. Also, we take on open and cross cultural studies which relate urban reading culture with urban society, politic, economy as well as culture, thinking how it interacts with publishing industry, literature ecosystem, political ideology and urban culture. This provides a new aspect and a research method for Culture Studies. Meanwhile, this paper does not purely criticize the prevalence of consumeristic urban reading culture. Instead, we make efforts to find out how it emerges, what the inside features are and where it will evolve to, in the expectation to support the guidance and enhancement of urban reading culture’s future development.