ABSTRACT
In the study of media culture, the transcendence of contrapositions such as ideological domination-semiotic resistance, political economy-active audience reception, and global homogenization-local appropriation has been an unsettled key issue. While the necessity of overcoming binary thinking is recognized and emphasized, the second of each of the contrapositions gained more currency in the 1980s and 1990s. And since the turn of the century in particular, the pendulum seems to be swinging back to the first of the contrapositions, given the intensification in the global penetration of neo-liberal market fundamentalism and the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. Political and economic structures attract more urgent critical attention in the analysis of cultural globalization than people’s meaning-construction practices at the local level, while the relevance of the latter has never been exhausted.
