Transcultural Communication Practices of Variety Shows from the Perspective of Media Spectacle and Participatory Culture: A Case Study of Divas Hit the Road: Silk Road Season

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-475-4_18How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Belt and Road Initiative; Transcultural Communication; Media Spectacle; Participatory Culture

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) fostering global cultural interactions, China faces an urgent need to innovate transcultural communication paradigms to achieve the strategic objective of “people-to-people connectivity.” This study examines the variety show Divas Hit the Road: Silk Road Season through the theoretical frameworks of “media spectacle” and “participatory culture.” By analyzing representative segments of the program, it investigates the operational mechanisms of variety shows in transcultural communication. The findings indicate that the program constructs a “media spectacle” through the symbolic reconfiguration of exotic settings (e.g., visual narratives of Croatian sailboats and Icelandic museums), thereby transforming physical spaces into tangible arenas for cultural negotiation. Concurrently, by employing “participatory culture” practices—such as social media interactions and user-generated content (UGC)—the show extends transcultural communication from on-screen textual representation to real-world meaning co-creation. The study reveals that the program facilitates a dynamic process of “cultural symbol encoding—audience participatory decoding—transnational meaning extension,” marking a paradigm shift from one-way cultural dissemination to two-way meaning negotiation. These findings provide both theoretical insights and practical pathways for transcultural communication via mass cultural products in a globalized context, offering valuable implications for media practitioners and policymakers.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xinyue Fan
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/11/11
TI  - Transcultural Communication Practices of Variety Shows from the Perspective of Media Spectacle and Participatory Culture: A Case Study of Divas Hit the Road: Silk Road Season
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 10th International Conference on Modern Management, Education and Social Sciences (MMET 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 143
EP  - 151
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-475-4_18
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-475-4_18
ID  - Fan2025
ER  -