Mass Culture

10 Key excerpts on "Mass Culture"

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  Sociology

  The Essentials

  • Margaret Andersen, Margaret Andersen, Howard Taylor(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  As some people resist the influence of market-driven values, movements to reclaim or maintain ethnic and cul- tural identity can intensify, such as seen among extremist groups in the Middle East, even while pro- democratic movements also exist there. The Mass Media and Popular Culture Increasingly, culture in the United States and around the world is dominated and shaped by the mass media, including popular culture. Indeed, the culture of the United States is so infused by the media that, when people think of U.S. culture, they are likely thinking of something connected to the media— television, film, video, and so forth. The term mass media refers to the channels of communication that are available to wide segments of the population—both print and electronic. Popular culture refers to the beliefs, practices, and objects that are part of everyday traditions, such as music and video, mass- marketed books and magazines, newspapers, and websites. Instagram Facebook Twitter OnStar DirecTV You can see how strong cultural monopolies have become if you just imagine how surrounded you are, even as an individual, by various devices (many of them owned by the same company) that deliver culture to you. Photos: Phone, Maxx-Studio/ Shutterstock.com; Satellite Dish, Roobcio/Shutterstock.com; LCD, Oleksiy Mark/Shutterstock.com; Tablet, Telnov Oleksii/Shutterstock.com Copyright 2020 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.

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  The Cultural Return

  • Susan Hegeman(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  chapter 2 Haunted by Mass Culture 41 To say that culture is a concept that mediates between parts and wholes is all well and good. But it’s important as well to recognize the histori-cal specificity of what those parts and wholes are. Here, I take up one particular well-known usage of the idea of culture, “Mass Culture”—a historically specific phenomenon, dependent upon a complex, modern arrangement of social life—to demonstrate the workings of culture as a dialectical concept within a particular historical situation. The ultimate goal will be to shed some light on the meaning of “Mass Culture” and some of the terms it is often compared to or elided with, especially “popular culture” and “mass media.” Like “culture,” “Mass Culture” is a complex term of art in the context of a relatively capacious set of debates about the relationship between the activities of daily life and politics. In particular, “Mass Culture” appears alongside questions of how political and positional subjectivi-ties are created and suppressed; the relationship between propaganda and the public and private spheres; and how to articulate the connec-tions between different kinds of cultural audiences, forms, and styles: elite, youth, minority, subcultural, countercultural, and so forth. Finally, like “culture” as a whole, the debates that “Mass Culture” signals have come to seem both passé and wearying, artifactual of other intel-lectual moments. Which is to say that “Mass Culture,” like culture as a whole, has experienced its own reification. It has become especially ossified into the framework of two easily caricatured, and ultimately 42 | Haunted by Mass Culture convergent, debates: the first, about art versus Mass Culture; the second about popular culture versus Mass Culture. Both of these debates have their origins around World War II and its immediate aftermath, and both were revived in different ways during the cultural turn.

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  Sociology

  The Essentials

  • Margaret L. Andersen; Howard F. Taylor, Margaret Andersen, Howard Taylor(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  culture is being exported to other nations, as well as the other way around. This photo shows the Old Navy store that opened in Tokyo, Japan. Kyodo/Newscom Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. CULTURE 43 of local communities. As some people resist the influ-ence of market-driven values, movements to reclaim or maintain ethnic and cultural identity can intensify, such as seen among extremist groups in the Middle East, even while pro-democratic movements also exist there. The Mass Media and Popular Culture Increasingly, culture in the United States and around the world is dominated and shaped by the mass media. Indeed, the culture of the United States is so infused by the media that, when people think of U.S. culture, they are likely thinking of something connected to the media—television, film, video, and so forth. The term mass media refers to the channels of communication that are available to wide segments of the population— the print, film, and electronic media. The mass media have extraordinary power to shape culture, including what people believe and the infor-mation available to them. If you doubt this, observe how much the mass media affect your everyday life. A YouTube video “goes viral.” Friends may talk about last night’s episode of a particular show or laugh about the antics of their favorite sitcom character. You may have even met your partner or spouse via electronic media.

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  Inventing Popular Culture

  From Folklore to Globalization

  • John Storey(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  16 Mass Culture 2 Popular Culture as Mass Culture Like the discovery of folk culture, the invention of popular culture as Mass Culture was in part a response to middle-class fears engen-dered by industrialization, urbanization, and the development of an urban-industrial working class. The new industrial towns and cities of the nineteenth century very quickly evolved clear lines of class segregation, in which residential separation was compounded by the new work relations of industrial capitalism. Such developments, it was argued, could only mean a weakening of social authority and the commercial dismantling of cultural cohesion. It was in this con-text, and its continuing aftermath, that the study of the culture of “the masses” first emerged. Culture Against Anarchy Undoubtedly, both in Europe and the United States, the first really influential presentation of popular culture as Mass Culture was Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869). It was this book which established the tradition of seeing popular culture as Mass Culture, powerfully putting in place an agenda which remained dominant in cultural debate from the 1860s until at least the 1950s. In Arnold’s famous phrase, culture is “the best that has been thought and said in 17 Mass Culture the world,” singular and universal, radiating timeless and absolute value (1960: 7). Although it can be attained only by “the disinter-ested and active use of reading, reflection, and observation, in the endeavour to know the best that can be known” (179), it seems that the attainment of culture is forever out of reach for most people. Arnold can be quite explicit about the social limits of culture and cultivation. For example, in “The Bishop and the Philosopher” (1863): The mass of mankind will never have any ardent zeal for seeing things as they are; very inadequate ideas will always satisfy them. On these inadequate ideas reposes, and must repose, the general practice of the world.

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  Culture and Identity

  • Warren Kidd, Alison Teagle(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Given that the forms and styles of popular culture vary greatly and change rapidly, it is an important area of sociological investigation. Everyone in British society is a consumer, and virtually everyone is a part of a wider media audience. Within sociological thought Mass Culture and Popular Culture 125 we have seen a move away from alarmist and pessimistic ‘doomsday scenarios’ of the power of the media towards a much more considered approach that looks at the content of popular culture, its producers and its audience. The audience, or consumer, is seen by many thinkers as active and creative. This is not to say that ideology does not exist, but rather that the process of ‘decoding’ and ‘reading’ is too complicated for people to be seen as ‘cultural robots’. The idea of a ‘decoding’ individual and a creative group that uses popular culture in an active fashion will be taken up in Chapters 9 and 10. Important concepts Artistic culture • Commodification • Commodity fetishism • Consumption • Excorporation • High culture • Hyper-real • Ideology • Low culture • Mass Culture • Mass society • Pluralism • Popular culture • Social culture Exam focus (a) Evaluate the idea that popular culture has limited value. (b) Assess the claim that the media help us to create an identity. (c) Discuss the claim that mass media output has very little direct effect on the audience. (d) Assess the effects of the mass media on popular culture. Critical thinking 1. ‘Reality television shows such as “Big Brother” and “I’m A Celebrity” are examples of the “dumbing down” of popular culture. They have no cultural merit.’ To what extent is this the case? 2. Is there a wide choice of media to cater for all consumers? Does free choice really exist? 3. ‘The culture of the working class is just as worthy as that of the upper class.’ Do you agree? Do individuals consume the media passively? To what extent is this the case?

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  Mass Society

  • Salvador Giner(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Culture has therefore vanished and what is left in its stead is only the big lie of prefabricated make-believe: thus Henri Lefebvre claimed that in modern Mass Culture make-believe has become a permanent substitute for experience, and has thoroughly undermined the once realistic quality of everyday life. 58 The culture of mass man is only made up of mediocre dreams and ephemeral thrills. { A N I N T E R M I N A B L E A N D F E R O C I O U S D E B A T E * I77 Mass Culture is inherent to mass society Mass Culture does not precede mass society, nor is it superimposed upon it. It is not ' superstructural', to use a particular expression. Atomization, to give just one example, is institutionalized as much through the economic and poli-tical mechanisms of the mass society as through the mass media, which scatter and split up the population : people glued to their television sets neither desire nor need speak to each other. Thus, in its advanced stages, a mass society cannot be imagined without the entire apparatus of the mass media of com-munication and the 'culture' they generate. 'It is through Mass Culture', said Alain Touraine, 'that industrial civilization truly comes into being'. 59 McLuhan for his part spoke of a 'homogenized society' that has become so precisely because of the media and their mode of cultural transmission, 60 an idea that echoes the earlier words of Dwight Macdonald : Mass Culture . . . breaks down old barriers of class, tradition and taste and dissolves all cultural distinctions. It mixes and scrambles everything together, producing what might be called homogenized culture. 61 It is for these reasons that the spread of Mass Culture is not just a threat of general cretinization and brutalization but, as Rosenberg pointed out, it also paves the way for totalitarianism.

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  Culture and Society

  An Introduction to Cultural Studies

  • David Oswell(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  But if the ordi-nariness of ordinary culture is measured with reference to the baseline of ‘all the people’, then this ‘people’ comprises a national population and is grounded in the space of the nation: namely, in the space of culture in its bounded, anthropological sense. This said, if we simply understand the rela-tion between culture and power in the context of the very English genealogy presented by Williams, we miss out on any critique of the Romanticism engrained in the notion of culture as ordinary and as a way of life and we fail to understand how this anthropological notion of culture, as is made clear in the critique of Bildung and Kultur , dangerously cedes any notion of culture as organic to nineteenth and early twentieth century nationalism. Mass Culture as Commercial and ‘American’ The late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century saw the rise of forms of productive technologies and knowledges that facilitated the Mass Culture AND SOCIETY 80 production of products (Aglietta, 1979). The classic apocryphal example is Henry Ford’s Model-T motor car – ‘any colour as long as it’s black’ – that was produced, not by a team of craftsmen working on the car from start to finish, but on an assembly line where each worker would contribute only to the making of a small part of the car according to their particular specialised skills. Mass production thus relied on the invention of new knowledges of production and organisation, most notably the development of scientific rationalism or Taylorism brought with it an understanding of production along the lines of time and motion studies. Mass production, though, needed mass consumers. The Model-T was made more cheaply because of increased economies of scale and hence it was more affordable to buy for larger numbers of the population. And with mass production and consumption also came mass media and adver-tising. The products needed to be sold in the newly formed consumer markets.

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  Myths for the Masses

  An Essay on Mass Communication

  • Hanno Hardt(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  focus on the process of socialization, the method of mediation, and the circumstances under which effects can be achieved. In addition, it is useful, fast, and efficient, but also versatile, typically operating in the present, and open to social scientific scrutiny. As such it reflects the American experience of a world that is knowable and, for that reason, conquerable. Mass communication also belongs to the vocabulary of the American century, like freedom and democracy, where it constitutes the most popular synonym for the current conditions of modernity, joined by terms like Mass Culture, mass society, or mass market and buttressed by the principles of mass production and mass con-sumption. It is a twentieth-century concept with obscure origins and applied beyond academic circles by a public awakening to the consequences of a technology-driven modern existence.The idea of mass communication certainly attracted public interest before the celebrated alliance between democracy and technology showed signs of exhaustion, and the novelty of urban thrills and suburban bliss had turned into an alienating experience for a growing number of individuals. When notions of wealth rather than welfare direct the long march of society towards capitalism, casualties are left in its path, accord-ing to keen observers of twentieth-century society. For instance, Erich Fromm’s or David Riesman’s classic laments include the complicity of mass communication in the conditioning of modern society.

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  Making a New Deal

  Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939

  • Lizabeth Cohen(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  In the contest over workers' loyalty raging during the twenties, Mass Culture seemed to be a winner. Encountering Mass Culture 101 There were some, however, like the pioneering sociologist at the University of Chicago, Ernest Burgess, who remained skeptical that the growth of a national network of communication, commercial leisure, and consumerism heralded the end of cultural diversity. He told the Section on Neighborhoods of the Minnesota State Conference of Social Work in 1928 that he felt it was "entirely too early to predict what the full effect of the motion picture, the automobile, and the radio will be upon American and world civilization." 5 Burgess was right to suggest that the impact of Mass Culture was not self-evident and that only with the passage of time would its effects be discernible. A longer view makes it possible to move beyond the prevail- ing contemporary assumption that the abundance of these new cultural forms meant that all people responded to them, and in the same way, and exposes the complex process by which Mass Culture and consump- tion entered different people's lives. 6 It is my contention that Mass Culture — whether chain stores, standard brands, motion pictures, or the radio - did not in itself challenge working people's existing values and relationships. Rather, the impact of Mass Culture depended on the social and economic contexts in which it developed and the manner in which it was experienced, in other words, how Mass Culture was pro- duced, distributed, and consumed. As those circumstances changed by the end of the 1920s, so too did the impact of Mass Culture on Chicago workers.

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  Mass Culture, Popular Culture, And Social Life In The Middle East

  • Georg Stauth(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part I Mass Culture: General Perspectives Passage contains an image

  Consumer Culture, Symbolic Power and Universalism

  Mike Featherstone

  Introduction

  This paper seeks to provide an outline of the basic features of consumer culture and move beyond regarding it as merely a Mass Culture by inquiring into the problem of the differential reception and the use of consumer goods and images. Utilizing in perspective derived from the work of Pierre Bourdieu it emphasises the symbolic nature of consumer goods and images and the way they are the source of a struggle between various classes and groups who seek to use the logic of symbol systems to create distinctions which favour their own interests. The paper ends with some speculative remarks about the reception of consumer culture in Third World countries. Here the view that consumer culture can merely be regarded as a product of the universal logic of capitalist development is questioned and some of the possible ways how consumer goods and images can be used by various classes and groups to enhance their particular interests are outlined.

  Consumer Culture

  The term consumer culture points to the impact of mass consumption on everyday life which has involved a series of transformation in the symbolic order, meaning structures and practices. To use the term consumer culture as opposed to for example the term consumer society is to emphasise that mass consumption has not merely provided an extension of the range of commodities available for purchase in the market place, the culmination of a long–term process which has left existing motivational structures and cultural values intact, but that this process has entailed a reorganisation in the form and content of symbolic production and everyday practices. The term consumer culture should not be taken as a judgement which points to the passivity of regimented and regulated consumers, rather consumer culture offers productive consumption in the sense that it holds out the promise of a beautiful and fulfilling private life: the achievement of individuality through the transformation of self and lifestyle. While consumer culture should by no means be seen as identical to contemporary culture, it can be argued that it is a central element within the production of contemporary culture. Despite the persistance of groups which seek to place themselves beyond the reach of the market — for example the oppositional practices of youth subcultures and new social movements — the dynamic of the market with its voracity for the 'new' leads it to rapidly retreading and recycling of both the latest styles and elements of tradition.

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