Telemodernities: Television and Transforming Lives in Asia
Tania Lewis is Associate Professor and Deputy Dean of Research in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University (Melbourne).
Fran Martin is Associate Professor and Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne.
Wanning Sun is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Technology Sydney.
Tania Lewis is Associate Professor and Deputy Dean of Research in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University (Melbourne).
Fran Martin is Associate Professor and Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne.
Wanning Sun is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Technology Sydney.
Tania Lewis is Associate Professor and Deputy Dean of Research in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University (Melbourne).
Fran Martin is Associate Professor and Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne.
Wanning Sun is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Technology Sydney.
Imagining Global Mobility: TLC Taiwan
-
Published:August 2016
Chapter 4 extends the analysis of lifestyle television’s role in shaping imaginative geographies through a study of the U.S.-owned Travel and Living Channel—available in many countries across Asia—in Taiwan. Interviews with Taiwanese viewers suggest that one of the most notable impacts of this channel is the way it works to shore up the global orientation of young, urban, middle-class internationalist subjects, consolidating their consciousness of their own perceived potential for future mobility both outward, toward the global, and upward, toward upper-middle-class consumer lifestyles. In using TLC to think out new identities based on the capacity for social and geographic movement, this chapter argues that these viewers are accumulating an immaterial form of “movement capital”; it is through shoring up the value of such movement capital that lifestyle programming on TLC Taiwan contributes to the transformation of identities.
