A Transcultural Reading of Television Advertising

Abstract

Global television has enabled cultures across the world to meet within the virtual space and interact in terms of decoding, meaning making and appropriating messages. It is also the case of the Romanian audience, a local community of viewers who have long been exposed to highly censored and restrictive programming (under the communist regime) and who are now enabled to identify with the (western) communities they have aspired to. We intend to illustrate our case with TV advertisements, which, generally, provide abundant material for television viewers, with socio-culturally determined profiles, to re-construct meanings into either coincidental or disjunctive semantic outputs. Since the act of consumption is productive, we aim to show that in spite of the possibly conflicting readings of the poly- and multi-semantics of the ads, viewers can coalesce into interpretative communities irrespective of their cultural make and cooperate towards the production of a joint meaning. We consider that this is an illustration of transculturalism at the level of a local audience interacting with the symbolic representations of cultures elsewhere on television.