Performing Fear in Television Production: Practices of an Illiberal Democracy (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9789463724579)

What goes into the ideological sustenance of an illiberal capitalist democracy? While much of the critical discussion of the media in authoritarian contexts focus on state power, the emphasis on strong states tend to perpetuate misnomers about the media as mere tools of the state and sustain myths about their absolute power.
Turning to the lived everyday of media producers in Singapore, I pose a series of questions that explore what it takes to perpetuate authoritarian resilience in the mass media. How, in what terms and through what means, does a politically stable illiberal Asian state like Singapore formulate its dominant imaginary of social order? What are the television production practices that perform and instantiate the social imaginary, and who are the audiences that are conjured and performed in the process? What are the roles played by imagined audiences in sustaining authoritarian resilience in the media? If, as I will argue in the book, audiences function as the central problematic that engenders anxieties and self-policing amongst producers, can the audience become a surrogate for the authoritarian state?

Author: Siao Yuong Fong
ISBN-10: 9463724575
ISBN-13: 9789463724579
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Language: English
Published: 09/28/2022
Pages: 212
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.30w x 0.80d