Young Adults’ TV Consumption and Their Implementation of Filial Piety in Taiwan

Abstract

The ethnographic turn in mass communication and audience research manifested the limitations of those traditions which de-contextualize the audience from their consumption environment and drew our attention toward the role of the media in one’s everyday life in the contemporary world. It’s assumed that ordinary people do not just watch TV without any reflection on that activity as a whole, they construct personal meanings according to their cultural identities and individual experiences. Filial piety is considered a virtue and defined as the duties, feelings or the relationships existing between children and their parents in most oriental cultures. Spending time with parents, trying to understand how parents feel, need, and want, and accompanying parents in their leisure activities are regarded being filial. This study explores how young adults accompany their parents watching television. Research on family television has been abundant, however, little is attended to the way television mediates the relationship between young adults and their aging parents. It was found that, different from those who live with their parents, young adults who do not live with their parents due to work or study choose to watch television with their parents with a purpose of keeping company with them and showing concerns and care about them rather than simply “watching television”. They are inclined to “tactically”(as in de Certeau’s “Making do”: uses and tactics, 1984) use their limited time at home to spend with their parents. Young audience’s co-viewing with their parents is incorporated into their implementation of filial piety. This study displays how peoples’ media consumption being appropriated and transformed to create personal meanings in light of their own interests and rules in the practice of everyday life.



Author Information
Ting-Yu Chen, Nanhua University, Taiwan

Paper Information
Conference: MediAsia2013
Stream: Media Studies

This paper is part of the MediAsia2013 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Chen T. (2014) Young Adults’ TV Consumption and Their Implementation of Filial Piety in Taiwan ISSN: 2186-5906 – The Asian Conference on Media & Mass Communication 2013 – Official Conference Proceedings https://doi.org/10.22492/2186-5906.20130103
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/2186-5906.20130103


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Posted by James Alexander Gordon