从电视广告创意看大陆、香港两地文化观念的差异

Differences of Cultural Ideas between Chinese Mainland and Hong Kong Seen from Images of TV Advertisements

电视广告的表意过程和行为是一项文化实践活动。广告把人们从现实生活中带出来,带入到一个图像的世界,又将图像的世界带入生活。香港与大陆广告创意所表达出来的两地文化差异,证实了在这样的实践循环活动中,文化已成了广告图像符号的表征(representation),文化同时也是一切表征的前提。

The economic reason that advertisement, as a way of sales promotion, provides commodity information for audience can account for the importance of advertisement in TV communication. Moreover, like a mirror, modern advertisement also reflects changes of social life as well as differences in thinking.The behavior and expressing process of TV advertisement is a kind of cultural practice. Advertisement brings people from real life into a world of images, and then brings images back into life. The cultural differences between Hong Kong and the mainland seen from images of TV advertisement have demonstrated that in such a circulation of practice, culture had been represented by symbolic images of advertisement. Culture is also the premise of all representation.Designers of advertisement stand in a cultural circumstance in which discourse dominance is implemented during their creation. In another word, an idea which we have to accept and which represents interests of dominant classes would surely influence the process of advertisement practice.Hong Kong and Chinese mainland have the same cultural and historical origin. But the two have been practicing two different systems that brought about different social management systems, ideas or concepts, which require the advertiser to prove legitimacy of the systems in order to maintain their operation. Based on adaptation to systems and compulsory acceptance of orthodox education, people living under different systems develop traditions, folk legends and ethical stories of their own. These differences in ideology, life background, social structure as well as individual development have formed different advertisement culture between the mainland and Hong Kong.This article considers differences of cultideology on creativeness, with the following conclusions: Ideology is not a series of static world outlook, but dynamic social practice duplicated by the state machine of ideology from its daily operation. Every one of us is subjected to the control of ideology. The mainland and Hong Kong share the same cultural tradition-the Chinese language, which is the prerequisite to the sameness of the two cultures. However, big dissimilarity still exists whose appearance comes from political systems as well as ideology related to them. While we look for the reason from the cultural forms, differences in ideology emerge. Among many factors that may have impact on advertisement images, such as regional disparity, different dialects and conventional dissimilarity, differences in ideology is the biggest.In the mainland, political concept, as part of ideology, along with consistency with the nation's administrative system, places itself in a dominant position in the sphere of ideology including value system, ideas about daily life, behaviors and so on. All other aspects are dominated by the political concept.Domination comes as a natural compromise. Different from the state political apparatus, such dominance mainly depends on the politicized discourse circumstance of the mainland to reach its objectives. In such a discourse circumstance any cultural practice will have an unbreakable baseline-the nation's political goals. With the opening up of the mainland and the return of Hong Kong to the motherland, HK's political emphasis has been laid on the mainland, especially on Beijing. With the globalization, economic factor has been continuously reinforced during the process of social constructing. Political ideas of Hong Kong and Chinese mainland will gradually compromise each other, and economic cooperation will be closer and more frequent. At that time differences in cultural ideas between the two areas would see some changes.