Glocalization, neoliberalism and reality televisionsocial media as the second screen of reality talent competition programs in China and Spain

Abstract

As a political-economic project, neoliberalism was localized in China and Spain during the same period at the end of the 1970s; as a form of television content, reality television gained popularity in China and Spain in the 2000s with the global flow of reality television formats. This is not a historical coincidence between China and Spain. Rather, it forms a part of the globalization process and the integration of both countries into the global neoliberal political and economic order, along with the localization of neoliberalism as a cultural hegemony in non-Anglo-American countries. Globalization is also related to the interaction of media technologies and business. China and Spain are located in different internet ecosystems-the ecosystem of China and the U.S.-based ecosystem-where Twitter and Weibo are two commercial microblogging services based on similar business models. Both serve as the second screen of television in each country. This is a thesis about the feature of the glocalization of neoliberalism in the form of reality television and the interpellation of neoliberalism, as an ideology, in the discussions about reality talent competition programs on social media in China and Spain. We discuss the theories and socio-cultural backgrounds of this topic. In the empirical study, we use the application program interface and crawlers to collect data from Twitter and Weibo. A supervised machine learning-supported tool is applied on Python to realize the computer-assisted analysis of Tweets in Spanish and Weibo posts in Chinese. The results show that the neoliberal values of competition, self-improvement, and individualism are manifested in the discussion about the reality of talent competition programs through the judgement of the talent and ordinariness of contestants. Moreover, by comparing two social media platforms as the second screen of reality television, we argue that Twitter affords the function of a forum in which audiences, official accounts of the program, and accounts that are not related to the program can participate relatively equally. On Weibo, the hashtag is not limited to a forum for users to talk about the program; it affords the function of an advertising campaign for the sponsor and the program in which ordinary users and audiences are engaged.