pop culture final

emily gamboa

Popular culture: What/who defines it?

• The “popular” is commonly thought of as liked by many people, but it doesn’t have to be liked to be a part of pop culture

• Beyond numbers: popular doesn’t mean it had to be known to everyone

• Popular does not mean it is necessarily of lesser quality than lesser known, more exclusive culture

• Popular = people = “democratic, grassroots, ordinary” (democratic principle and as judgement about who can make sense of “real” art

• Often contrasted with the “elite” (wealthy, corporations, politicians - elite have had historical legitimacy to dictate what is popular culture.

High Culture

Cultural products and activities, such as classical music and fine arts, traditionally associated with a society’s wealthy elite and educated class, requiring significant time, money, and formal education for appreciation

• compromises a culturural tradition is maintained by its exclusivity

• historically, considered “authentic culture” compared to non-elites, who were thought to lack culture

• opera houses vs. underground hip-hop show (high culture v. what elitists consider “low brow culture”

Culture: What/Who defines it? - popular ideas of culture focus on the presence of culture within everyday practices, or ways of life that are lived and experienced daily (everyday rituals such as meals, work, religious observances, sports, sex, family, and friendship)

• A group’s shared practices, values, and beliefs (material or nonmaterial = neither society nor culture could exist without the other)

Material culture

The physical objects or belongings associated with and meaningful to a culture

Nonmaterial culture

Consists of the ideas, attitudes, and beliefs of a society that shape social structures and interactions

Capitalism pt. 1

• Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and distribution and geared toward the generation of profit

  • Capitalism is dominant economic system in most parts of the Western world

  • Capitalism instils its ideology, or set of cultural values, beliefs, and ideas that justify a particular social arrangement, throughout societies and their culture.

  • capitalists ideology helps to determine the shape of culture and culture helps to maintain capitalism

  • through pop culture is shaped by capitalism, it is not entirely determined by it

  • pop culture is also not simply an arena for resistance, for defining and expressing oneself beyond capitalist consumption

  • It is both and neither, a struggle between “pleasure, profit, and, ultimately, the distribution of social and economic power in the world”

Textbook def of pop culture

• popular culture: “Popular culture as something like ‘the communicative practices of everyday life’ that are shared among many members of a society, including and especially those who aren’t particularly socially, economically, or politically powerful”

Industrial Rev

• new forms of culture (and rec) arose within the Industrial Rev

• Ind Rev: The period of development that transformed largely rural, agrarian societies in Europe and the US into industrialized, urban ones. This was the major explosion of capitalism, the start of huge factories that mass-produced products (There were social consequences brought about by the developing capitalists economy)

consequences of ind rev

• urbanization

• worldwide migration, both within countries and across boarders

• poor working conditions

• lack of housing

• sanitation problems/disease

• crime/violence

• new tech (contributed to mass media)

• Changes in culture (new rec activities, new ways of organizing space and social relations)

Mass Media

Organized system of communication encompassing various mediums, platforms, and technologies to transmit information, entertainment, and opinions to a large, geographically dispersed audience

• Literacy rates significantly increased during and after the Ind Rev due to factors such as the need for a skilled workforce, the availability of more printed materials, and gov initiatives to provide formal education

• The first mass- circulation newspapers began to appear with the development of the steam printing press led to dramatic cuts in printing costs and speedier production (before steam printing press, newspapers were rare, expensive, short, infrequently printed, and aimed at a narrow audience)

Changes in mass communication business models

• penny press: a new business model for newspapers in the 1830s that sold papers for a penny, making news affordable and accessible to the working and middle classes (unlike early newspapers, that relied on political funding and expensive subscriptions, penny papers depended on advertising rev for their income; later, other published forms of mass communication appeared, such as magazines, widely printed novels, and comics)

Changes to Public Space and Recreation

• Changes include restrictions on communal space

  • Enclosure Acts, which converted common grazing land into smaller, private holdings to make the land more economically productive (privatization: private ownership and control)

• Effects on pop recreation:

  • Physical constraints on the kinds of rec that could take place, made it harder for people to connect with one another, traditional forms and sense of community were weakened or lost, increased divisions between the landholding and laboring classes

Creating common spaces - ind rev

crowded conditions in working-class slums led to new forms of solidarity and the creation of new common spaces

• people would congregate in the street, but drawbacks included an increase in police presence and surveillance

• the pub became central to many communities

• courtyards became gathering places for people

Pop culture and Capitalist Ideology

• construction of pop culture as a necessary escape from the demands of working life

  • this perspective on pop culture didn’t challenge capitalistic ideology, but rather reinforced it

• Neg. effects of Ind. Rev. lessened and working class began to see the potential for benefiting from its gains

  • The dom. conservative perspective of pop culture constructed it as escapism rather than a radical challenge to existing social structures

  • momentary pleasures experienced through media culture serve as superficial substitutes for the real empowerment that could come from improvements to their conditions

Folk Vs. Mass Culture

From the end of WW2, following major cultural and social changes brought by mass media innovations, the meaning of “popular culture” began to overlap with the connotations of “mass culture,” “media culture,” “consumer culture,” and “culture for mass consumption”

• Mass culture: Cultural products that are both mass-produced and for mass audiences

  • Mass culture depends on electronic media to convey its message to the largest possible audience

  • done to secure maximum profit, which is its ultimate goal of mass culture

• Folk Culture: Cultural products and practices that have developed over time within a particular community or group and that are communicated from gen. to gen. and among people who tend to be known to one another.

  • The transmission of folk culture is generally technologically simple (ex: face-to-face, oral communication)

Ideology and Mythology

Ideology: Set of cultural values and beliefs that justify particular social arrangements and relationships, esp those that reinforce dominant power structures and patters of inequality

• the values and beliefs that unite individuals in a society are made to seem natural, inevitable, and unalterable

• Creates patterns of values and beliefs that people abide by and that helps maintain the dominant ideology

Mythology: Narratives present within a culture that support ideology

• Signs can take on mythological significant by reflecting a culture’s dominant, unspoken beliefs or values

  • myth as a form of rep. that expresses and often invisbily justifies the dominant values of a culture

  • myths are not natural but historical, shaped by specific power relations

Cultural industry

Cultural industry: The corporate-dominated system of mass-producing and distributing standardized cultural goods, like film, music, and advertising (to: Maximize profit, pacify the masses by stifling critical thinking, create false desires. integrate people into the capitalist system)

Consumerism

• the cultural industry, rather than satisfy preexisting desires among audiences, relies on advertising, popular music, and other avenues to invent new (and largely useless) desires for consumer goods, all to be fulfilled through shopping and entertainment

• leads to a culture of consumerism and the creation of endless markets for these largely unnecessary products. sustains both the markets that arise to meet these demands and the same advertisers and the same industries that helped to manufacture these desire in the first place

Consumerism and the illusion of choice

• the culture industry promotes an ideology of endless consumption, which distracts the masses from greater social inequalities and the harsh realities of capitalist labor (The “freedom” it offers is the freedom from thinking critically and the well-being provided by consuming cultural products is a substitute for genuine happiness)

• consumers are presented with many options but the content is often just variations of the same standardized products. This gives the consumer the feeling of having their unique tastes catered to while conforming to market trends.

Products Critical of Capitalism

• dissatisfaction with and opposition to standardization and reproduction of capitalism produces cultural products critical of capitalism

• These critical cultural and media products:

  • Operate within and leave the basic structures of capitalism and pop culture production in place

  • Offset the need to introduce “newness” and “criticality” into the system of standardization

Consumption

• The ways, reasons for, and types of products we consume have shifted in modern times

• Consumption (modern def): A pattern of behavior where people focus on purchasing and enjoying goods and services to define and signal their identity, values and social status

• Changes in production and consumption arose due to industrialization and the division of labor

• Commodities: Objects and services produced for consumption or exchange by someone other than their producers

Consumerism

A historically unique form of society in which consumption plays a central role (establishing by and influencing values and practices)

• Changes due to consumerism

  • the range of commodities that have become available

  • the ability of more people to engage in new forms of consumption

  • the creation of new wants and desires through advertising and display

• What we choose to consume and how we consumer are full of social significance

Hybridity

• Representations of identities can be either/both authentic and commercialized, spontaneous and crafted, and serve as distinct cultural expressions.

• Hybridity: the blending of two or more cultures. Often arising due to large diasporic movements, distinct cultures that blend homeland with receiving cultures have developed.

  • The “third culture” that results from this interaction is not simply a combination of the two but a space in which differences between and within individual cultures express themselves

• The notion of hybridity can be expanded to envelop cultural products that combine elements from distinct cultures or genres.

Subcultures (Ex: Skateboarding)

• An informal group or community that is part of a larger culture but has specific cultural attributes that deviates or differs form existing social norms

  • often, its members invest in alt. identities and systems of belief and practice.

• In various subcultures, participants appropriate certain materials of pop culture to distinguish themselves from other consumers through the invention of alternative collective identity and style.

• all large societies are made up of smaller groups of people

  • While we belong abstractly to a nationality defined society, we do so through our participation in concrete groups of people with whom we have something in common

• not all social groups are subcultures

  • distinct sense of culture that deviates or differs from dominant culture

  • culture usually rejected or treated with suspicion by “official,” mainstream culture

Counter-Culture (Ex: Black Panther Party - misunderstood legacy)

• a group whose members adopt cultural patterns in opposition to larger culture, express antagonism towards the existing social order, and propose alternative ways of organizing society

• pose and explicit challenge to the dominant social order

• not just their political activity alone. There is an important cultural aspect to countercultures

  • Distinguished from most contemporary activist groups and political organizations due to cultural expressions and activities

  • Have their own set of cultural objects through which they express their political views and that go on to influence other groups/cultures

Relationship between subculture and counterculture

• the politics of subcultures

  • Countercultures are usually imagines as explicitly political; it’s harder to see how a subcultural practice might also be political

  • subcultures are infused with political stances, as they are usually formed in response to racial, gendered, economic marginalization

• A subculture can become a counterculture once it develops a more explicit political agenda

• Subcultures and countercultures are brought into contact with the “dominant,” mainstream culture through pop culture rep. of these practices

• representations often mischaracterizes, sanitize, or demonize these groups

• Mainstream determines what is the subculture and counterculture (some groups may be excluded from the mainstream, while their cultural expressions, images, and language are appropriated by the mainstream)

Globalization - the complex process of the intensifying integration, interaction, and interdependence of economies, societies, and cultures on a global scale

• can be distinguished into different aspects such as economic, political, technological, cultural, etc.

Pros - New Cultural Products

• has the potential for new forms of cultural expressions and genres facilitates by more globally connected world

• Ex. rock and roll-mis of diasporic African music combined with musical influences from various parts of Europe and the Americas within an American context

Cons - Cultural Imperialism

• when a dominant culture exerts influence over another, often resulting in the spread of its values, customs, and products while potentially eroding local traditions

• Ex. Eurocentric beauty standards - Promotion of Caucasian features (fair skin, light eyes, straight hair, etc.), this caused non-western cultures to adapt to these challenges

Production of culture

Culture Industry: the corporate-dominated system of mass-producing and distributing standardized cultural goods, like film, music, and advertising

• describe how cultural goods are manufactured and distributed in a standardized way to appeal to the widest possible audience and maximize profits

• cultural industries include the institutions of mass media such as the music and film industries, advertising, tv, and professional sports, among others.

• when thinking of producers of pop culture, we can think of two interconnected parts:

  • the technological infrastructure

  • those who produce cultural experiences and products

• modern cultural experiences wouldn’t be possible without the technological infrastructure, but there would be no need for this technology without public interest in the cultural experiences and products that this technology enables

• the context in which popular culture is produced plays a role in determining what the product looks like

  • Ex: the relationship between the production and content of pop culture

    • The standard length of pop songs: made for the radio (ads)

    • Set-up of social media apps: meant to be as addictive as possible

Representation

• the process of using symbols and images to create and communicate meaning about the world and ourselves

• these rep. can influence social norms, shape perceptions of different groups, and can either foster understanding or perpetuate harmful tropes and stereotypes

• language, as the central medium of culture, makes these rep. possible

• rep. involves the social production of meaning through language - languages do not just communicate preexisting “realities”

• language influences the way we perceive the world around us

  • social constructions of reality are not just reflected in rep., but rep. play a role in constructing our understanding of reality