Television News and The Politics of Glocalisation

While rural people in a developing country like Thailand is often perceived as media dupes, the notion of ‘active audiences’ within the sphere of cultural studies coupled with an ethnographic methodology allow us to gain insight of how media messages are reproduced and interpreted by the audience. This book analyses the articulations of local and global cultures in rural Thai society through audiences’ reproduction and interpretation of news meanings. It demonstrates the audiences’ reading of television news is an interdiscursive practice where a number of discourses are brought to bear on the text, both from and within a ‘local’ and a ‘global’ context. Television news does not simply represent another encroachment of ‘globalisation’, nor destroy all together any notion of a local ‘organic identity’. Interestingly, in particular contexts audiences’ interpretation of news tend to reveal a form of cultural hybridisation where local and global cultural identities are combined to make sense of news events.