2. Mass Culture and Popular Culture
• The pessimistic view sees popular culture as a problem
for society, whereas optimistic view thinks popular culture
can be uses in highly creative ways.
High Culture; products that are intellectual, artistic,
difficult to understand, expensive and aimed at those with
an exclusive taste, not shared by ordinary people.
Low Culture; products that are easy to understand,
cheap, ‘throwaway’, common and so on.
3. ‘Mass Society Thesis’
In mass society; individuals lose their sense of
community, lose their individuality and come to rely on
strong authority from above.
It suggests that popular culture prevents critical and
revolutionary thought.
This is seen as dangerous, because if the masses cannot
think for themselves, the groups who run the society can
dominate as they wish.
4. The Frankfurt School
• The best known and most influential version of the Marxist
interpretation of mass culture and commodification was
provided by Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer.
• Adorno and Horkheimer argued that advertising in capitalism
creates and manipulates false needs and desires that are
fulfilled by consumption.
• The consumption of cultural products, under a capitalist
economy creates fetishism, which is in favor of the ruling
group.
• In this respect, consumerism is ideological.
• Media as ‘cultural industry’.
5. The Pluralist Perspective
They argue that;
• Different people perceive the media in different
ways.
• Individuals have plural choices what to consume
and not.
• Power is distributed among many different groups
in society.
• Human beings are active, creative beings.
6. Postmodernity and Popular Culture
• Whereas modernity was characterized by the
manufacture of products and the use of raw materials,
postmodernity is based on consumption rather than
production.
• In postmodernity, life-style construction and the creation of
self-identity are based on the types of popular culture
products we consume, and the creative uses to which we
put these products.
• Anderson versus Baudrillard
7. Youth Culture and Subculture
• Youth culture is big business for ‘culture industry’.
Subculture; a group that has broken away from the
dominant culture and has its own specialist norms and
values.
Deviant Subculture; a group that reject the common
norms and rules of the society.
8. The Historical Development of
Subcultural Study
• Robert Merton- mid 1930s.
• The Chicago School
• Howard Becker
9. Popular Culture and Subcultures
• Excorporation: the cultural products, images, styles, life-
styles, behavioral patterns and so on of the dominant
culture are taken over by a subculture in order to
challenge and change the meanings the dominant culture
has given to them.
• Can subcultures change the structure of the society or by
rejecting the system, do they become more deviant in
time?
10. Gramsci and Hegemony
• The starting point for the idea of hegemony is Gramsci’s
observation that ruling-class domination and control in
capitalist society does not rest simply on the use of force
and violence, but also operates at the level of ideas.
• Hegemony means that culture is the result of a war of
ideas between different groups, each with its own idea of
what society should be like, depending on its own
interests.
11. Semiology
• Semiology is interested in signs and symbols hidden in
everyday life.
• Weinstein uses the term ‘bricolage’ from Levi-Strauss
to discuss how subcultures borrow, redefine and use
styles and symbols from cultural groups other than their
own.
• Bricolage- the mixing of symbols by reclassifying them
and actively creating new and meaningful subcultures
based on resistance to dominant values.
