THE CONSTRUCTION AND RE-CONSTRUCTION OF FOOD CULTURAL SPACES IN GUANGZHOU BY THE SOCIAL MEDIA
CAI Xiao-mei1,2, LIU Chen1, ZENG Guo-jun3
1. Department of Tourism Management, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China;
2. Cultural Industry and Cultural Geography Research Center, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China;
3. School of Tourism, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China
Abstract In the contemporary world, with progressing of the information technology, the social media plays more and more significant roles in people's everyday life. The intertwining of media spaces and real spaces are becoming commonly as well. However, the existed social and cultural geography studies both domestic and abroad always focus on the construction and reconstruction of cities and their people, and the impact of the media on our everyday life spaces, and neglect the maps of meaning drawn by the media, in the discourse of geography. Therefore, in order to make up these deficiencies, this article selects four popular social webs in China: Sina blog, Weibo, Douban, and Tudou as the study cases, using text analysis to analyze the contents, which are about food cultural spaces, a kind of urban space which connect to our everyday life of Guangzhou, in the above media, in order to explore the reflection, construction and reconstruction of food cultural spaces in Guangzhou by the social media. The results include that: ① the structure of food cultural spaces in Guangzhou is constructed by the social media. Also, the food cultural spaces in Guangzhou are labeled as ‘global-local spaces’; ② the social media break up the meanings of the food cultural spaces in Guangzhou, and re-construct them as the multi-cultural spaces, commodity cultural spaces, power-spaces and emotional spaces. In short words, the social media construct the socio-cultural meanings of the food cultural spaces in Guangzhou, through organizing people's social activities online.
2013, Vol. 28 
