Abstract

What grasp do we have of the relationship between consumption of media and the shaping of individual lives and identities? What do we know about the experiences of women in Asia? This chapter explores women’s everyday experiences of media in Asian countries in relation to contemporary contexts of wide-ranging social change and transition. The media involve the complex processes of social change and transition—from the conduct of everyday life, to the reflexive understanding of a global world, to the construction of new identities and a constant tension in its expression within the everyday. Based on my ongoing ethnographic media studies in global sites (Kim 2005, 2008, 2011, 2012), this chapter provides a critical analysis of the emerging consequences of media consumption in women’s everyday lives at a time when the political, economic, and technological contexts in which the media operate are becoming increasingly global. I argue that media globalization in Asia needs to be recognized as a proliferating, indispensable, yet highly complex and contradictory resource for the construction of identity within everyday lived experience.