Travelling Media Structures

Adaptation and Demarcation in China's Public SARS Discourse

  • Cornelia Bogen Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22029/oc.2019.1167
Keywords: China, SARS, new media, (non-)official discourses, counter-publics, media structures, intercultural comparison, modernity

Abstract

The flow of communication structures across various media formats can be traced back to the printing press culture of early modern Europe, where three distinct media features appeared: disagreement, sensationalism, and self-reference. These features continue to characterize health communication in today’s online media (Bogen 2011; 2013). This study investigates whether these media structures also characterize contemporary health communication in non-Western countries like China, which are undergoing a modernization process. By taking European structures of healthcare communication as a point of reference, I will analyze how Chinese healthcare communication differs from its European counterpart. This paper takes SARS (the first globally emerging infectious disease of the 21st century) as a case study. While the SARS discourse illustrates the existence of these communication structures in the Chinese media and indicates some convergence between East and West, it is clear that these media structures have been adapted to a specifically Chinese cultural program of modernization. Moreover, I will identify ‘non-European’ structures that can be explained by China’s specific cultural background, and explore the processes of transfer and demarcation that occur when media structures are adapted across cultures.

Author Biography

Cornelia Bogen, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China

Cornelia Bogen, Associate Professor at USC-SJTU Institute of Cultural and Creative Industry, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, P.R. China, is a scholar of Media and Communication Studies whose research focus is health communication. Her PhD thesis identified three main structures (contradiction, sensationalism, self-reference) that characterize how health and illness have been presented since the emergence of mass media in Western and Central Europe. Since 2010, she has been investigating intercultural aspects of modernization processes, by studying the impact of new media on the current transformation of doctor-patient interaction and public health discourses in China.

Issue
No 8 (2019): Distribution
Section
_Articles