Mass Culture/Popular Culture

Edited and Compiled by Jyotirmoy Sil

Topics

• High culture
• Mass/Popular culture
• Mass/Popular Culture and Media
• Mass Culture: Icons and Trends
• Mass Culture: Contexts of Consumption
• Mass Culture in the age of Globalization

High culture

• Aesthetic taste
• Time consuming
• In popular usage, the term high culture identifies the culture of an upper class (an aristocracy) or of a status class (the intelligentsia)

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High Culture

• Matthew Arnold ’s Culture and Anarchy (1869):
• Culture is "the disinterested endeavour after man’s perfection" pursued, obtained, and achieved by effort to "know the best that has been said and thought in the world“

High Culture

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• Arnold’ points on ‘high culture’:
• on the basis of standards of judgment acquired through formal education that was affordable only to the elite sections of society.
• excluded a large number of cultural objects and practices
• disregarded the ‘tastes’ of the working classes as invalid criteria for defining or assessing culture.

Mass Culture

• ‘Cultural products [artefacts and phenomena] that are mass produced and for mass audience’ (Oxford Reference)
• ‘Examples include mass-media entertainments—films, television programmes, popular books, newspapers, magazines, popular music, leisure goods, household items, clothing, and mechanically-reproduced art.’(Oxford Reference)
• lack of originality, taste and refinement
• Popular Culture
• Low culture

Production and Consumption of Mass Culture

• Has mass appeal
• Connected to the Capitalist mode of cultural production
• Economic profit
• Target consumer: a large section of mass
• Mass produced

‘Culture Industry’

• Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’ The Dialectic of Enlightenment
• commercial marketing of culture
• in contrast to "authentic culture"
• functions on the principle of homogenization of public taste for the purpose of making economic profit

Bengali TV Serials: Mass Culture

Bengali Serials

• Have mass appeal
• Illusory
• Contrasts to the ‘authentic culture’
• Reinstate the patriarchal structure of the society
• Target audience: Bengalis

Low Culture/Mass Culture> ‘High’ Culture

• Shakespeare’s plays, Dickens’s serialized novels

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• Made for a target audience
• For economic profit
• Mass appeal
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• ‘High Culture’

Mass/Popular Culture and Media

Mass Media

• “the means of communication that reach large numbers of people in a short time, such as television, newspapers, magazines, and radio” (Dictionary.com)
• Mass media is communication—whether written, broadcast, or spoken—that reaches a large audience. This includes television, radio, advertising, movies, the Internet, newspapers, magazines, and so forth.

Role of media

• media plays a crucial role in the creation, dissemination and reception of popular culture
• audiences are exposed to images, objects and ideas that constitute them as members of an increasingly globalized community of consumers
• technological means of transmitting information about cultural objects, events and practices
• At points media becomes the very site for the performance of cultural identities
• Telecast of Republic Day parade: national identity, ‘unity in diversity’
• Live telecast of India-Pakistan cricket match

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Media> National/Cultural Identity

• Example: An India-England Cricket Match

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Media> Cultural artifacts

• Example :Cinemas, advertisements
• Fashions
• Trends

Media> revive Cultural artifacts

• Media has ability to absorb elements from already existing cultural forms and practices and re-present them in new combinations to a wide section of audiences.
• Popularization of ‘Bhangra’ in the 1990s> television series, movies
• Media/Bollywood’s appropriation of folk-songs:
• Coke-Studio’s appropriation of Lalon Fakir’s songs in Hindi songs
• Revive of the Odia song ‘Rangabati’

Media in the Ancient Times: Examples

• Drama/theatre
• Orchestra
• Poster
• Games/rituals
• Books
• Coins in Roman times

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Mass Culture: Icons and Trends

• Icons are objects, texts or people that come to represent a certain set of values relating to gender, class, age, region, religion or lifestyle to a wide enough audience to command instant recognisability.

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Examples

• Any particular pattern of speech, clothing, behaviour or action shared by a large number of people in a group may be defined as a trend.
• In capitalist societies, trends in domains like fashion and technology are generated by industrialists and disseminated by mass media and appropriated by large sections of consumers as part of their collective identity.

Example of Trend: Ghajini haircut

Comrade Avinandan’s Moustache

Trending memes

Mass Culture: Contexts of Consumptions

• ‘High’ Culture: appealing for limited number of people
• Mass culture: capacity to become integrated into the everyday experience of living

Classical Music: ‘High’ Culture

Popular Bollywood Songs: pop Culture

Mass Culture and Globalization

• In the context of a networked global economy and mass media, it is impossible to think of ‘culture’ as representing the values and practices of any single, ‘pure’ ethnic, religious or national community.
• Hybridity: an admixture of elements from diverse sources into forms that cannot be properly said to ‘belong’ to any one particular group of people, though they may be consumed by a wide range of audiences across various geographical and cultural locations.

Example: street-food in India�

Dress

References�

• Danesi, Marcel. Popular Culture: Introductory Perspectives. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012.
• Hopper, Paul. Understanding Cultural Globalization. Cambridge: Polity, 2007.
• Storey, John. Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture: Theories and Methods. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1996.
• Tomilson, John. Globalization and Culture. Cambridge: Polity, 1999.
• Zach Lahey, Globalization and Indian Cultural Values<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoimUYti25A>
• James Gifford, The Industrial Production of Popular Culture: SFU Continuing Studies Lecture, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gXQBmyTXlQ>
• Wikipedia.org