ABSTRACT
Popular culture consumption is central to the everyday life of youth in Thailand. It is more so when globalization speeds up the fl ow of local and transnational popular culture. For the industry the vast expansion of the market means achieving the goal of profi t maximization. In this process the production of cultural product has been integrated and major emphasis has been placed on the distribution and marketing fl ow of these products. Hence, the energizing of capital’s motor via informationalism (Castells 1996). The rapid fl ux of trans-cultural imageries on the electronic media of communication has elevated the lived society into an emerging society of signs. But in this transformative social arrangement cultural commodities such as Western popular music and Hollywood fi lm, Japanese manga, and recently, Korean computer game, music and television drama, are competing with Thai cultural products in the everyday politics of youth. They become the pleasurable semiotic terrain of meaning construction and contestation that is closely connected to the socio-political context as well as the class position and gender of youth.
