Welcome To The Machine

The Critical Approach

• According to a critical approach to popular culture, the ascennnddance of certain kind of pop culture can be explained by the enormous economic and cultural power of the mass media industry

• May emphasize the darker aspects of popular culture…

  • Ownership of media among few multinational corporations

  • Manufacturing of desire and resultant consumerism

  • Perpetuation of sterotypes within the media

  • Socialization

• Karl Marx

  • A society's culture and its symbolic imagery reflects its economic and social structure and reproduce it over time

    • Cultural norms serve to benefit its ruling classes and perpetuate their power

    • The ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force

• Antonio Gramsci

  • Recognized the ideological power of culture as an effective means of social control

  • Cultural Hegemony is a form od dominance through the dissemination of mass mesdia which controls its audience by engineering popular consensus throught the power of persuasion

• Adorno and Horkheimer

  • The media industry relies on advertising, popular music, and the glabor of cinema to invent new disres for consumer goods

• The ever-increasing hegemonic and economic power of the culture industries, the global proliferation of their market-tested products, and what the “lowering of cultureal standards" has caused many scholars throughout the twentieth century and presently to utilize a critical approach to popular culture

  • This approach may also be utilized to examine other social issues in popular culture, such as production and utilization of unsafe and unfair over-seas manufacturing, the lack of diversity in Hollywood, and the control of media by a handful of companies

• The media and culture industry

  • Grazian goes into detail discussing the multi-media conglomerate giants that control popular culture, including Sony, Time Warner, and Disney

  • A few key points…

    • Control of the media and its content by very few companies

    • Purchasing power of these conglomerates

    • Wealth concentration that results from this purchasing power