If we are to consider a historicity of popular storytelling culture, what are the specificities of the contemporary television culture in terms of creating and sharing popular stories? This article explores television storytelling culture in terms of ...
If we are to consider a historicity of popular storytelling culture, what are the specificities of the contemporary television culture in terms of creating and sharing popular stories? This article explores television storytelling culture in terms of its spatiality, historicity and cultural economy. Firstly, a phenomenological approach suggests that the discursive space of television plays a role of mediating heterogeneous factors, such as generality and contingency, structure and particularity, and private and public. Secondly, in a historic perspective of information technology, the social practice of storytelling through television is characterized as a mixture of the traditional oral mode of storytelling and modem system of knowledge-circulation. Thirdly, the normative power of culturalization is critically analysed, which is observed to operate in the way of regulating the individual subject's desire for enunciating self-stories in late capitalist society. Here ideas of artistic autonomy and creativity are vulnerable to the power of governing the subject's passion for work and pleasure. My emphasis is however on the mode of television workers co-working and appropriating popular multi-voices, which are found to actualize flows and webs of stories existing in the social. It is argued that this collaborative mode of discursive production enhances ethical and aesthetical values of television popular culture. For individual storytellers' act of collecting and translating and recycling popular stories into particular visual forms may potentially and tactically misappropriate the normative discursive power at work in the field of creative industry, towards the production of popular culture of storytelling.