Redai dili (Aug 2024)
Take You Back to Hometown: Does Food Awaken Memories of "Place"? — Analysis Based on Disembedding Mechanism and Media Geography
Abstract
Place memory and emotions are popular topics in human geography. The rapid development of information technology has promoted new social media platforms, built virtual spaces that differ from physical spaces, and provided new carriers for place memory and emotional sustenance. In this study, subtitle, bullet-screen, and comment data were quantified on the basis of disembedding theory and media geography combined with the natural language processing method to explore the process of local memory awakening under the background of "digital-reality fusion," taking the documentary "A Bite of China" as the study case. The following results were obtained: 1) The theme words of the subtitles included hometown, food, taste, and life. In the bullet-screen and comment data, the words "food" and "hometown" were the core nodes that built the semantic network together with other theme words. Food has become a representative of local culture, not only as a focus of local economic development but also as a window to regional culture, and is capable of awakening people's deepest memories of their hometowns. Food reflects the good wishes and life expectations of people, with the memory of the taste of their hometown having become a symbol of this attachment and the nostalgia touching the hearts of travelers. 2) The documentary awakens social memories, shapes places in modern society, and constructs a sociocultural space that carries food culture and daily practices. From the data visualization results, it could be seen that the audience as a whole showed positive emotions, the immediacy of bullet-screen was more likely to stimulate positive emotions than comments, the semantic network of bullet-screen was denser, and the audience was more inclined to comprehensively evaluate the overall level of the video in comments. Modern media technology breaks through the limitations of physical space, bringing the experience of virtual space to the audience and allowing them to instantly express their emotions and feelings while watching the video, thereby realizing the generation of emotional ties and social relations across time and space. Mediated communication has become a habitual practice in modern society, providing channels through which audience members can exchange information and ideas and express their emotions daily, thereby shortening the mental cognitive distance of people and having the same authenticity as unmediated communication and interactions. 3) Digital media provides a new interactive platform for the audience, dissolves the geographical limitations of traditional communication, and realizes dialogue between virtual and physical spaces. It also reconstructs the relationship between people and places and shortens the emotional distance between people and hometowns while providing information for daily life practices. Digital media has reconfigured the relationship between people and places in society through new media technology, creating a new type of physical space connection; namely, virtual space. In addition to local activities, the virtual space provides a new place for people to communicate and interact with one another. Although it is also a place that carries people's emotions, it enriches the audience's experience, thus contributing to the construction of the media's sense of place. This study expands the content of dietary geography and provides theoretical and empirical references for the reconstruction of human-land relations in the digital information age.
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