Chapter 9: Popular Culture and Intercultural Communication

Taylor Johnston, Ben Nieuwstraten, Lily Le, Sean Longley, and Madi Mello

Introduction

• Learning About Cultures Without Personal Experience
• The Power of Popular Culture
• What is Popular Culture?
• Consuming and Resisting Popular Culture
• Consuming Popular Culture
• Resisting Popular Culture
• Representing Cultural Groups
• Migrants’ Perceptions of Mainstream Culture
• Popular Culture and Stereotyping
• U.S. Popular Culture and Power
• Global Circulation of Images and Commodities
• Cultural Imperialism
• Scholarly Article Analysis
• Real Life Connections

Learning about Cultures Without Personal Experience

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What is Popular Culture?

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• High culture
• Cultural activities that are often the domain of the elite or well-to-do
• Ex: ballet, symphony, opera, great literature and fine art
• Sometimes framed as international
• Cultural value is transcendent and timeless
• Low culture
• Refers to activities of the non-elite
• Ex: music videos, game shows, professional wrestling, stock car racing, graffiti art, TV talk shows, etc.
• Traditionally seen as unworthy of serious study
• Popular culture: a new name for low culture
• Referring to cultural products that most people know about
• This includes television, music, videos and popular magazines

The Power of Popular Culture

• More complex than most people think
• Social effects of popular culture
• Video games and music causing violence
• Drug and alcohol addiction being portrayed as normal
• Oversexualization in media leading to the abuse of women
• Popular culture is having some negative effects on social issues
• Discouraging research on the matter isn’t ideal, especially in America, where we have some of the biggest social influence in the world.
• The products of U.S. popular culture
• Found all across the globe
• So common hat little systematic research has been conducted to

explain the reasons for their success.

• In contrast to the rest of the world, Americans are hardly exposed to

popular culture from outside the United States.

Consuming and Resisting Popular Culture

Consuming Popular Culture

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• People negotiate their ways through popular culture in different ways
• Don’t have to win over majority to be popular
• People often seek out or avoid specific forms of popular culture
• Cultural Texts
• Popular messages
• Television, shows, movies, advertisements, or other widely disseminated messages
• Encoding
• The process of creating a message for others to understand
• Decoding
• The process of interpreting a message
• There is unpredictability in how people navigate popular culture

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Resisting Popular Culture

• Some people actively resist cultural texts
• Complex process
• Examples of how people resist:
• For some consumers of popular culture, the racial composition of characters is important to them and this affects their consumption of certain media.
• For others, racial implications of popular culture texts can influence their resistance.
• Complexity of encoding and decoding process and its relationship to the consumption and resistance of particular popular culture texts
• Ex: #BOYCOTTSTARWARSVII
• Resistance to popular culture tends to express a concern about how others are going to be impacted by the popular culture representations.
• People often avoid particular forms of popular culture by refusing to engage in them.
• Sometimes resistance is targeted at the profits of popular culture corporations

Representing Cultural Groups

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Migrants’ Perceptions of Mainstream Culture: Cultural Focus Group

• Ethnographers and interpretive scholars have examined the influence of popular culture crossing cultural and international boundaries.
• Set up focus groups to see how different cultures perceived the depicted culture on a television show. ��- Ten different cultural groups watched the popular 1980s series, Dallas

• Israeli Arabs � • New immigrants to Israel from Russia� • First and second generation immigrants from Morocco� • Kibbutz members

* These groups were taken as a microcosm of the worldwide audience of Dallas, and their readings of the program were compared with ten groups of matched Americans in Los Angeles.

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Migrants’ Perceptions of Mainstream Culture: Cultural Focus Group Results

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Results of American perception of Dallas:�Americans found that Dallas did not accurately portray American culture in the United States.

Results of the Israelis, Arabs, and immigrants perception of Dallas: �Much more inclined to believe that this show was about portraying authentic American culture in the United States.

Focus group conclusion: �Though these results are not surprising, this focus group explains the intercultural communication process. It is evident that overly dramatic themes within media in popular culture are influential in constructing ways of understanding cultural groups.

Pros: �- allows one to use popular culture to improve their language skills �- aids in learning many of the nuances of another culture

Cons: �- cultural appropriation �- can become distracted with problematic/stereotypical themes within a particular film and can associate that with the culture at large

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U.S. Popular Culture and Power

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Popular Culture and Stereotyping

• Our knowledge about other places, even places we have been, is largely influenced by popular culture.
• The impact of popular culture may be even greater for people who do not travel/interact in relatively like-minded social circles.
• Stereotypes are connected to social values and social judgments about other groups of people. These stereotypes tell us how “we” value and judge these other groups

Popular Culture and Stereotyping: Matt Waters

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• Matt Waters is an example of cultural stereotyping

Global Circulation of Images and Commodities

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• In considering popular culture, we need to think about not only how people interpret and consume popular culture but also how these popular culture texts represent particular groups in specific ways.
• The majority of the internationally circulated popular culture is U.S. popular culture.
• U.S. -made films, for example, are widely distributed by an industry that is backed by considerable financial resources. The U.S. film industry earns far more money outside the United States than from domestic box office receipt

U.S. media dominates international popular culture

American Popular Culture Dominance

-Billboard of James Dean for his film, East of Eden in Tokyo.

-Contrast between James Dean’s presence in Tokyo and the absence of a similarly popular male Japanese star

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Cultural Imperialism

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During the 1920s, the US government believed that having U.S. movies on foreign screens would boost the sales of U.S. products because the productions would be furnished with U.S. goods. This is an example of cultural imperialism.

5 ways of thinking about cultural imperialism:�1. As cultural domination�2. As media imperialism → domination or control through media �3. As nationalist discourse�4. As a critique of global capitalism�5. As a critique of modern society

Scholarly Article Analysis

Cultural Imperialism Theories (2018)

• Cultural imperialism theory is based in post-WWII relations between the United States and Soviet Union, and their puppeteering of the global stage
• The relationships between the values and ideas that are transmitted through American media and culture, as well as their effectiveness on affected countries is highly debated

Cultural Imperialism Theories (2018)

• Globalization, better referred to as Americanization since the rise of the internet because of how domineering the US is on that front, is tightly knit with cultural imperialism
• Cultural imperialism influences the research of many different topics, and through extensive research, is refined to better identify the exact influences that it has in various contexts

Real World Connections

Real Life Connections

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Classic American TV Shows

Real Life Connections

• Classic American TV Shows
• Friends, The Office, Gossip
• American Lifestyle
• Influence the views of not only the youth and citizens of the US but as well as people globally around the world
• Global Celebrity RM from BTS

Real Life Connections

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Real Life Connections

• My personal connection with learning korean
• Studied through watching korean dramas
• Culture, daily life, food, customs→ netflix
• Textbook example: korean student
• Encoding and decoding

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Real Life Connections

• Popularization of Korean Culture
• Kpop, Korean Dramas, Korean Shows
• Black Pink and BTS
• Forms of Copying Korean Shows
• I can see your voice (8 countries)
• Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand, Korea, China, Romania, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Bulgaria, USA

Real Life Connections

• Korean Show- king of the masked singer
• 31 countries as of 2020

Real Life Connections

• Coca-Cola company is a great example of Cultural Imperialism.
• Promotion of “American Way of Living.”
• Often referred to as “Bottled America.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dcksBDOcTI

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Conclusion

• We learn about other cultures through popular culture.
• Cultural groups are often represented in ways that can play into stereotypes.
• Popular culture is produced by cultural industries, and serves social functions.

Thank You!