Name: Hirva Pandya
Roll No.: 10
Enrollment No.: 4069206420210022
Paper no: 205 A
Paper code: 22410
Paper name: Criticism
Topic: Popular Culture
Sem.: 3 (Batch 2021- 2023)
Introducation:
Popular culture, or pop culture, (literally: "the culture of the people") consists of the cultural elements that prevail (at least numerically) in any given society, mainly using the more popular media, in that society's vernacular language and/or an established lingua franca. It results from the daily interactions, needs and desires and cultural 'moments' that make up the everyday lives of the mainstream. It can include any number of practices, including those pertaining to cooking, clothing, mass media and the many facets of entertainment such as sports and literature. (Compare meme.) Popular culture often contrasts with a more exclusive, even elitist " high culture".
The term ‘popular culture’ holds different meanings depending on who’s defining it and the context of use. It is generally recognized as the vernacular or people’s culture that predominates in a society at a point in time. As Brummett explains in Rhetorical Dimensions of Popular Culture, pop culture involves the aspects of social life most actively involved in by the public. As the ‘culture of the people’, popular culture is determined by the interactions between people in their everyday activities: styles of dress, the use of slang, greeting rituals and the foods that people eat are all examples of popular culture. Popular culture is also informed by the mass media. There are a number of generally agreed elements comprising popular culture. For example, popular culture encompasses the most immediate and contemporary aspects of our lives. These aspects are often subject to rapid change, especially in a highly technological world in which people are brought closer and closer by omnipresent media. Certain standards and commonly held beliefs are reflected in pop culture. Because of its commonality, pop culture both reflects and influences people’s everyday life (see eg Petracca and Sorapure, Common Culture). Furthermore, brands can attain pop iconic status (eg the Nike swoosh or McDonald’s golden arches). However, iconic brands, as other aspects of popular culture, may rise and fall
If one regards culture as a way of defining oneself (an extremely individualist approach), a culture needs to attract the interest of people (potential members) and to persuade them to invest a part of themselves in it. People like to feel a part of a group and to understand their cultural identity within that group, which tends to happen naturally in a small, somewhat isolated community. Mass culture, however, lets people define themselves in relation to everybody else in mass society at the level of a city, a country, an international community (such as a wide-spread language, a former colonial empire, a religion...) or even of a whole planet.
Pop culture finds its expression in the mass circulation of items from areas such as fashion, music, sport and film. The world of pop culture had a particular influence on art from the early 1960s, through Pop Art.
Popular culture in the 20th and early-21st centuries
Popular culture can describe even contemporary popular culture as just the aggregate product of industrial developments; instead, contemporary Western popular culture results from a continuing interaction between those industries and those who consume their products(Bennett 1980, p.153-218). distinguishes between 'primary' and 'secondary' popular culture, defining primary popular culture as mass product and secondary popular culture as local re-production.jkjkjh
Popular culture changes constantly and occurs uniquely in place and time. It forms currents and eddies, in the sense that a small group of people will have a strong interest in an area of which the mainstream popular culture has only partial awareness; thus, for example, the electro-pop group Kraftwerk has "impinged on mainstream popular culture to the extent that they have been referenced in The Simpsons and Father Ted."
Items of popular culture most typically appeal to a broad spectrum of the public. Some argue that broad-appeal items dominate popular culture because profit-making companies that produce and sell items of popular culture attempt to maximize their profits by emphasizing broadly appealing items (see culture industry). But that may over-simplify the issue. To take the example of popular music: the music industry can impose any product they wish. In fact, highly popular types of music have often first evolved in small, counter-cultural circles ( punk rock and rap provide two examples).
Since World War II a significant shift in pop culture has taken place: from the production of culture to the consumption of culture. Commentators have noted that those in power exploit consumers to do more of the work themselves (for example, do-it-yourself checkout lines), and advertising on television, movies, radio, and in other places helps those in power to guide consumers towards what those in power consider needed or important.
Popular culture has multiple origins. In conditions of modernity the set of industries that make profit by inventing and promulgating cultural material have become a principal source. These industries include those of:
- popular music
- film
- television
- radio
- video games
- book publishing
- internet
- comics
Folklore provides a second and very different source of popular culture. In pre-industrial times, mass culture equaled folk culture. This earlier layer of culture still persists today, sometimes in the form of jokes or slang, which spread through the population by word of mouth and via the Internet. By providing a new channel for transmission, cyberspace has renewed the strength of this element of popular culture.
Although the folkloric element of popular culture engages heavily with the commercial element, the public has its own tastes and it may not embrace every cultural item sold. Moreover, beliefs and opinions about the products of commercial culture (for example: "My favorite character is SpongeBob SquarePants") spread by word-of-mouth, and become modified in the process in the same manner that folklore evolves.
A different source of popular culture lies in the set of professional communities that provide the public with facts about the world, frequently accompanied by interpretation, usually as vulgarisation, i.e. adapted for consumption by the public at large (which may lack the training to appreciate academic language). Such communities include the news media, and scientific and scholarly communities. The news media mines the work of scientists and scholars and conveys it to the general public, often emphasizing " factoids" that have inherent appeal or the power to amaze. For instance, giant pandas (a species in remote Chinese woodlands) have become well-known items of popular culture; parasitic worms, though of greater practical importance, have not.
Both scholarly facts and news stories get modified through popular transmission, often to the point of outright falsehoods. At this point, they become known as urban legends. Other urban myths may have no factual basis at all, having simply originated as jokes.
Examples of Popular Culture:
come from a wide array of genres, including popular music, print, cyber culture, sports, entertainment, leisure, fads, advertising and television. Sports and television are arguably two of the most widely consumed examples of popular culture, and they also represent two examples of popular culture with great staying power. Sports are played and watched by members of all social classes, but (tautologously) the masses are responsible for the huge popularity of sports. Some sporting events, such as the World Cup and the Olympics, are consumed by a world community. Sports are pervasive in most societies and represent a major part of many people’s lives. Showing allegiance to a team as a means of self-identification is a common behavior. Further, cheering for a sports team or a favorite athlete is a way any individual can become part of popular culture, as I and Tim Madigan explain in our new book The Sociology of Sport. Many people watch numerous hours of television everyday. It is such a prevalent aspect of contemporary culture it is difficult to imagine life without it. There are those who believe TV is responsible for the dumbing down of society; that children watch too much television; and that the couch potato syndrome has contributed to the epidemic of childhood obesity. The globally popular TV show The Simpsons provides us with an interesting perspective on television. In the episode ‘Sideshow Bob’s Last Gleaming’ (#137), while doing time in prison, Sideshow Bob becomes a critic of television. Although he was once a regular on The Krusty the Clown Show, Bob has become obsessed by television’s harmful effect on society. Bob argues that everyone’s lives would be much richer if TV were done away with. As a result, he devises a scheme to detonate a nuclear bomb unless all television is abolished in Springfield. Unable to locate Bob, Springfield’s city officials meet to discuss Bob’s demands of abolishing TV. A panicky Krusty proclaims, “Would it really be worth living in a world without television? I think the survivors would envy the dead.” Although there are people who agree with Sideshow Bob, the masses would more likely agree with Krusty: that living in a world without television is not really living. It is even more difficult to imagine a world without popular culture.
There are four main types of popular culture analyses:
production analysis,
textual analysis,
audience analysis, and
historical analysis.
The Formation of Popular Culture
Through most of human history, the masses were influenced by dogmatic forms of rule and traditions dictated by local folk culture. Most people were spread throughout small cities and rural areas – conditions that were not conducive to a ‘popular’ culture. With the beginning of the Industrial era (late eighteenth century), the rural masses began to migrate to cities, leading to the urbanization of most Western societies.
Urbanization is a key ingredient in the formation of popular culture. People who once lived in homogeneous small villages or farms found themselves in crowded cities marked by great cultural diversity. These diverse people would come to see themselves as a ‘collectivity’ as a result of common, or popular, forms of expression. Thus, many scholars trace the beginning of the popular culture phenomenon to the rise of the middle class brought on by the Industrial Revolution.
Industrialization also brought with it mass production; developments in transportation, such as the steam locomotive and the steamship; advancements in building technology; increased literacy; improvements in education and public health; and the emergence of efficient forms of commercial printing, representing the first step in the formation of a mass media (eg the penny press, magazines, and pamphlets). All of these factors contributed to the blossoming of popular culture. By the start of the twentieth century, the print industry mass-produced illustrated newspapers and periodicals, as well as serialized novels and detective stories. Newspapers served as the best source of information for a public with a growing interest in social and economic affairs. The ideas expressed in print provided a starting point for popular discourse on all sorts of topics. Fueled by further technological growth, popular culture was greatly impacted by the emerging forms of mass media throughout the twentieth century. Films, broadcast radio and television all had a profound influence on culture.
So urbanization, industrialization, the mass media and the continuous growth in technology since the late 1700s, have all been significant factors in the formation of popular culture. These continue to be factors shaping pop culture today.
Work Cited:
https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/p/Popular_culture.htm
“Pop Culture: An Overview.” Philosophy Now: a Magazine of Ideas, https://philosophynow.org/issues/64/Pop_Culture_An_Overview.
https://canvas.ou.edu
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