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2 Literary reviews
This part will summarize some crucial studies and achievements in the fields of cross-cultural communication and media cross-cultural communication across the world and in China.
2.1 Study of cross-cultural communication
Intercultural communication and interaction have existed since ancient times. Just as Larry A. Samovar and Richard E. Porter (2010), two scholars of intercultural communications once said: In 1959, the expression “cross-culture communication” was firstly used in The Silent Language, the work of Edward T. Hall, an American cultural anthropologist. In the 1960s, intercultural communication was firstly separated from anthropology, becoming an integral part of Communications. It aimed to research cultures and languages, which would pose a great cultural difference, and non-verbal elements and it paid special attention to interpersonal communication and relevant techniques of enhancing effective spread. The cross-culture communication became an independent discipline in Communications in the 1970s. Afterwards, Hall (1976) initiated two important concepts, namely, high context and low context, which have been adopted for analyzing differences among various cultures and exploring the way to reduce cultural dispute. In 1966, Alfred Smith edited Communication and Culture, an essay collection, which exhibited a collective achievement of research combining cultural researches and communications. Due to great transportation and telecommunication advances, and much closer interactions carried on among different countries, cross-culture communication experienced a rapid development in the period from 1980 to 1989, whose importance in terms of its research and implications has been widely recognized by western academia. The research findings in this period were mainly shown in Handbook of International and Intercultural Communication, edited by Molefi Asante and William B. Gudykunst (1989).论文网
2.2 Study of media cross-cultural communication
At the same time, profound advances in management, technology and science and their mutual effect gave rise to a direct consequence of the dramatic change in media industry, which laid a foundation for the so-called new order of media. One result of the change was that the media industry no longer took a political role. That is to say, they not longer treated audience as citizenry of a particular state and group, but as economic entity and integral part of consumption market.
In the 1980s, one American TV series called Dallas depicting middle-class value in the western society and life scene of contemporary USA premiered in CBS (Columbia Broadcast Company) and instantly gained a huge popularity in and out of America. This TV production, as a success example of cross-cultural communication in media field, caused deep thinking of cultural criticism scholars on media intercultural communication. Herbert Schiller (1975) discovered how cultural imperialism, as part of the global capitalism, under the slogan of “information circulation”, became a dominant ideology in the world by means of advanced technology from a macroscopic point of view. While other scholars thought that it had a positive effect on one culture. Just as Sayeed (1993) said, “it is quite a controversial comment that there exists such a geographic area in which inhabitants is native but different and some certain religious, cultural and racial factors can judge their people”. So, whether intercultural communication is one manifestation of well-intended cultural invasion, cultural infiltration and cultural imperialism, or one driving force of mutual exchange, integration and innovation of culture hasn’t got a consensus, but both of the opinions have a sound footing.
Intercultural communication inevitably leads to intercultural interpretation. People of perging cultural backgrounds tend to interpret one same culture persely and inpidually. Viewers from the same background might have similar opinions. Thus, the process fully reflects cultural uniformity and inpidual variability. But in order to spread one culture and value, these shows usually are made to be more likely to be interpreted in one particular way. Well-known cultural interpretation theories include three kinds of interpretation methods, namely, propensity interpretation, which is based on the meaning endowed by encoders; negotiation interpretation，which is based on audience’s social background and holds different view from that given by encoders; opposed interpretation, which gives totally opposite interpretation from the encoder’s intention. (Hall, 1981:16) Besides, the book The Export of Meaning---Cross-cultural Readings of Dallas by Liebes and Katz makes a classification on text interpretations about Dallas of several focus group members, providing a theoretical basis. (Liebes, Katz, 2003；159)