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neighbors. The scope of their social activities expand rapidly while their best friend
might not be one of their neighbors but someone dozens of miles away. Therefore,
the community in its original sense collapsed in the west, replaced by network of
social relations.
In the times of post-industrialization, capital group had to stimulate social
consumption due to prominent contradiction of over-supply. Television was spread
rapidly in such a context. Live advertisement on TV smartly changed people‘s
mindset, luring them into frequent purchase of many things they did not need at all. It
was right in this period that the western society bid a complete farewell to community
and entered the life of social relation network. Consumption culture began to
dominate.
By the end of last century, the West saw another transformation, that is, the
globalization, or in essence the globalization of multinational companies.
Globalization corresponds to knowledge economy, which takes creative industry as
its core. The creative industry basically assumes that everyone has creative thoughts
and creativity, and it allows people to display their creativity and thus contribute to
the construction of new social economy. The prerequisite of creative industry is the
full participation of every people while the enterprises set up the stage, that is, the
new media, where everyone will play an active role. People pay and yet are very
happy. This is one of the significant meanings of new media as well as of
globalization. What is globalization? And what is new media? Actually to certain
extent these two concepts are the same thing. Three major forces emerge gradually
in the political life of a country, which are, market (companies), state (government)
and civil society (non-profit organizations). In the arena of the world, the gradually
emerging structure is one of market (multinational companies), states (governments
and international organizations with countries as its members) and global civil
society (international NGOs). Such a structure will not come into being without the
new media. For example, the key driving force of globalization is multinational
company. However, it would be impossible for the multinational companies to
organize transnational economic activities without the new media.
The history of development shows that the role played by media in the East is
different from its role in the West. Although movable type was first invented in China,
the various media forms that followed this invention did not produce such great
social, economic and political changes in China as in the West.
China Reading Weekly: Why? Could it be attributed to the role played by those
people corresponding to such new media?
Yang Boxu: Media in essence is a kind of technology with certain technological
characteristics. Only after the emergence of certain class or group corresponding to
this technology could media play its role. And this class or group is the so-called
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