ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 provides a historical account of the emergence and development of what Frances Bonner terms ‘ordinary television’. Through a dialogue between existing scholarship on Vietnamese media and the theoretical accounts of ordinary television, this chapter explores how the development of ordinary genres in Vietnam generates new spaces for subjectformation based on the personalization of choice, which is significantly different from previous socialist practices that sought to suppress individual freedom. New ordinary genres promote the language of governmental ethics, that is, the active care of the self, in contrast to the moralist language of socialism that eliminated the possibility of auto-control. Vietnamese ordinary television thus operates as a site of tension between participatory and commercial impulses, reflecting how the neo-liberal promotion of self-empowerment gradually pervades the popular discourse in Vietnam, existing alongside, if not overshadowing, the pedagogic discourse of political obedience.
