| Summary: | 碩士 === 東海大學 === 企業管理學系碩士班 === 94 === It has been evidenced that the development of consumer culture is oftentimes shaped and facilitated by mass media. Through the ostensible use of their gate-keeping power, mass media not only influence, but also educate the consumer sector the norms and values of taste and preference. In this thesis, the researcher conducted a two-phase inquiry to empirically explore the idea of “home comfort” via its portrayal in the home and design magazines. Specifically, in the first phase of the study, media professionals who are accountable for the gatekeeper’s mission in the representation of home comfort were selected and interviewed to provide an illustration of their interplay in the process. Secondly, a content analysis was later conducted with 90 magazine feature stories in the years of 2000 to 2004 to shed light to the facets delineated after the actual execution.
From the interviews, it was discovered that the representation of home comfort can be depicted along the dimensions of “the individual level”, “the interpersonal level”, “the manipulation level”, “the organization level” and “the ceremony level”. Moreover, through their negotiated decisions and joint actions, the interplay among the various media gatekeepers tends to affect the representation of home comfort to a significant degree. Five emergent themes are found and presented as follows: 1) home comfort is the outcome of a cross-sensory journey that ultimately transcends all the five sensual modes and generally expressed as an integrated whole; 2) home comfort is the consumption of semiotics; 3) in the presentation of home comfort, there is a bipolar manifestation of “masquerade” and “release”; 4) in the portrayal of home comfort, there is a bi-polar pursuit of “new-for-the-old” and “old-for-the-new”; and 5) there are three levels of consumption preference in the quest of home comfort, namely the request “for copy”, “for imitation” and “for demarcation”.
The findings from the content analysis findings postulate that home comfort is a joint display of graphic presentation (i.e., photos) of home interiors and textual elaboration of story coverage. In terms of the graphical representation of home comfort, it can be differentiated among the five main categories of display: that is, "to serve in our behavior", "to serve in our body", "to serve in our sense organs", "to serve in our objects" and finally, "to serve in others expectation". In terms of the factors associated with textual representation, it is also found that the idea of home comfort can be an output from the application of "the value of extended-self", "the extrinsic value", "the other-oriented value", "the self-oriented value" and "the intrinsic value".
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