Pop Culture Exam

Culture

The overall group of values and traditions shared by a group of people.

Popular Culture

The segment of a culture that incorporates the activities of everyday life, including the consumption of consumer goods and the production/employment of mass-produced entertainments.

High Culture

The products of the elite arts, including classical music, literature, drama, opera, painting, & sculpture.

Mass Media

The means of communication, often controlled by the culture industry, that includes newspapers, popular magazines, radio, TV, film, and the Internet.

Mass Culture

A subset of popular culture that includes popular entertainments that are commercially produced for widespread consumption.

Dominant Culture

The group within a multicultural society whose traditions, values, and beliefs are held to be normative, as the European tradition is in the USA.

Cultural Pluralism

The condition in which minority groups participate fully in the dominant society yet maintain their cultural differences.

Archetype

A recurring character type or plot pattern found in literature, mythology, and popular culture.

Icon

A figure (often a celebrity) who enjoys a commanding or representative place in popular culture.

Canon

Books or works that are considered essential to a literary tradition, as the plays of Shakespeare are in English literature.

Culture Industry

The commercial forces behind the production of mass culture or entertainment.

Mythology

The overall framework of values & beliefs incorporated in a given cultural system or worldview.

Ideology

The beliefs, interests, and values that determine one’s interpretations or judgments and are often associated with one’s social class.

Pop Culture Paradox

The tendency to dismiss the popular culture of objects and practices central to our lives as trivial or meaningless.

Avant-Garde

The “cutting edge” of a particular medium; experimental creations that often challenge conventional ways of thinking and run contrary to established tastes.

Folk Culture

The traditional practices and customs of a specific geographic era

Frankfurt School

The group of intellectuals who combined Marxist theory with other approaches to analyze culture with a focus on forms of social stratification and inequity.

Theodor Adorno

The scholar most associated with the theories and ideas presented in the Frankfurt School.

Ray Browne

The BGSU scholar who is considered the “Father of Popular Culture Studies” in academia.

Semiotics

The study of signs (signifying systems)

Cultural Studies

An expansive interdisciplinary field of study that investigates the things that people make and do in particular times and places in relation to broader systems of power.

Denotation

The most basic or literal meaning of a sign

Connotation

A sign’s secondary, culturally specific relations or associations

Convergence Culture

The way 21st century technologies combine tasks and activities that previously were distributed among discrete systems, and the ways consumers of media content interact with that content and each other.

Hegemony

The ways a dominant group secures the consent of subordinate groups by making the ruling class’s values and beliefs the norm for that society.

Cultural Appropriation

The adoption of the practice or customs of one group by members of another. Often, but not always, the appropriator is part of the dominant culture.

Joseph Campbell

Scholar best known for his influential text Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), which examines and interprets mythic tales and stories, such as the Hero’s Journey.

Genre

A category of artistic expression characterized by a particular content, form, or style such as folk music, detective novels, or action films.

Primary Text

A direct source of original information that, in popular culture studies, is generally the focus of analysis. They may be objects, events, or practices.

Code

As defined by John Fiske, a rule-governed system of signs, whose rules and conventions are shared by members of a culture, and which is used to generate and circulate meanings in and for that culture.

Decoding

The process of interpreting a message.

Encoding

The process of packaging a message to send to a recipient making use of the affordances of a particular medium.

Fan Fiction

Works written by fans of a particular source text involving aspects of that text such as the characters or aspects of the text’s fictional world.

Intertextuality

Literally “between texts,” or the ways texts interact; how one text acquires meaning in light of its relations with other texts.

Metatextuality

The ways in which a text refers to itself or the conventions of its genre.

Text

Anything that requires interpretation to be understood. This includes written works, but also objects, both natural and manmade, as well as practices.

Textual Poaching

As coined by Henry Jenkins, the process of appropriating aspects of a published work and redeploying them in new creative contexts.

Subculture

A group that differentiates itself within the broader culture by having a set of beliefs and/or practices that are to some extent at variance with prevailing norms or beliefs.

Source Text

Either a work being adapted into another medium or a focal point of a fandom.

Participatory Culture

A model of media production and consumption in which private individuals play both roles.

Popular Press

Material written for the general public, as opposed to specialists.

Intersectionality

The idea that forms of social stratification such as race, class, sexual orientation, age disability, and gender do not exist separately but are interwoven together.

Fandom

A collective term for the fans of a particular media property.

Authenticity

In relation to cultural practices, the sincere expression of ability, belief, and/or personality. As opposed to fakery or affectation.

Authorial Intent

What the encoder of a message intends decoders of that message to understand.

Oppositional Position

The decoding of a message as intended, but a rejection of the intended attitude toward it.

Cosplay

The practice of dressing up as a character from a source text, such as a movie, novel, or video game.

Filk

A genre of folk music generated by fans of fantasy, science fiction, and horror.

Transmediality

he process of adapting content presented in one medium into others, as in the novelization of a film that itself is adapted from a video game.

Confirmation Bias

The tendency to favor or accept information that supports one’s already-held beliefs or values.