Drama production and audiences as ‘affective superaddressee’ in an illiberal democracy

Abstract

There is a long history of television and film research that highlights the essential roles audiences play in everyday production decisions. Based largely on Western media industries, these studies’ investigations of producer–audience relationships have revolved predominantly around the market concerns of liberal media models. So how do producer–audience relationships work when it comes to illiberal contexts of media production? Using Singapore as a case study, this article argues that existing approaches to producer–audience relations largely based on liberal media industries like Hollywood are insufficient for thinking through audience power in everyday media production in illiberal contexts. Drawing on insights from affect theory, I examine the materials gathered during an immersive ethnography of the writing process of a Singaporean television drama and propose conceptualizing audiences as an ‘affective superaddressee’, as a productive way to think about the work that situational audiences do in everyday media production in illiberal contexts.

Research on the Reform of Film and Television Production Courses and Their Student Achievement Evaluation in Colleges and Universities in Shanxi Province Based on Random Forest Algorithm

“…In the face of the changes in the industry's talent needs, the teaching of film and television production courses to introduce new concepts and technologies for colleges and educators, there is a certain amount of talent training pressure and difficulty in teaching implementation [11][12][13][14]. Second, film and television art professionals should have good practical skills, and the content of film and television works is closely related to people's lives, which requires people to take into account both professional and life in the creation to guarantee the authenticity and integrity of the content of the works [15]. Third, students need to have multidisciplinary knowledgeability, film and television creation design multi-professional and multidisciplinary knowledge, requiring creators to have crossborder awareness and proficiency in multiple fields of knowledge, understanding the differences that exist between different cultures so that film and television works are richer in connotation, more infectious and expressive, and gain more audience recognition and support [16].…”

‘They don’t need us’: affective precarity and critique in transnational media work from the margins of ‘Cultural China’

“…This contradiction also manifests in its state-linked but privatized mainstream media. Producers' subjection to, at times conflicting, state, nationalist and commercial disciplines generates tensions that run deep in the media industry's 'structures of feeling', often resulting in self-policing practices (Fong 2022). This raises questions about how much existing creative labour concepts critiquing neoliberal industry practices may apply or transform in a context like Singapore.…”