The Role of New Media in Shaping Audience Engagement with Chinese Independent Documentaries

บทคัดย่อ

This study examines how new media channels shape audience engagement with Chinese independent documentaries and explains why specific tactics succeed or fail. Integrating the SICAS (Sense, Interest & Interactive, Connect & Communicate, Action, Share) audience journey model with Uses and Gratifications (U&G) and Media System Dependency (MSD), we develop a stage–mechanism framework that links channel affordances to measurable outcomes. Using directed document analysis and multi-case synthesis of platform surfaces, creator communications, virtual events, and institutional reports, we map high-yield tactics to each SICAS stage and identify the gratifications they deliver (cognitive, affective/entertainment, social) under varying dependency conditions (individual, group, pseudo-environmental). Results show that sequenced, stage-aware orchestration—platform-native paratexts for discovery, structured real-time interaction, roleful community cadence, single-step conversion flows, and permissive remix with weekly curation—produces compounding gains in discovery, retention, conversion, and diffusion. Mechanism analysis clarifies boundary conditions specific to documentaries: over-novelty or gamification can erode narrative seriousness and suppress completion; automation is most effective when scoped to reply latency and load, but overuse flattens authorial voice. The proposed SICAS–U&G–MSD model offers a practical operations playbook for creators and curators and a theoretical account of when, how, and for whom tactics work in the new media ecology of Chinese independent documentaries.