What is Popular Culture?

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What is Popular Culture?
2
What is Popular Culture?

• Popular culture is a conceptual category. It
  can be defined in a wide variety of sometimes
  conflicting ways, depending on the context of use.

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What is Popular Culture?

• Popular culture is always defined, implicitly or
  explicitly, in contrast to other conceptual
  categories folk culture, mass culture, dominant
  culture, working class culture, etc.
• This in part accounts for why Fiske refers to
  popular culture as more a culture of process
  than of products (323).

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What is Popular Culture?

• To understand pop culture, we must understand its
  parts and several key terms.

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Key Terms

• Popular
• Statistical (Fiske 322), or a Quantitative Index
  (something that can be measured)
• But where do we draw the line? How many people
  must like something for it to be considered
  popular?
• Serves the interest of the people (Fiske 322)
• Fearful notion, especially for the elite. (Fiske
  323-25)
• What if this group gets out of control?
• Fears of the Frankfurt school.

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Key Terms

• Culture
• A way of life (lived cultures, or cultural
  practices like celebrations or youth culture)
• Signifying practices (cultural texts such as soap
  operas, pop music)
• Social circulation of meanings, values, and
  pleasures . . . the processes of forming social
  identities and social relationships, . . .
  entering into relation with the larger social
  order in a particular way and from a particular
  position (Fiske 322)

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Key Terms

• Ideology
• A systematic body of ideas articulated by a
  particular group of people
• What is feminist ideology?
• A belief in equal rights and opportunities for
  men and women.
• A politics embedded in a text
• What is the New Newlywed Games ideology?
• Fiske addresses this question when he describes
  its conservative, patriarchal nature.

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Key Terms

• Mass Culture
• Produces cultural commodities designed to appeal
  to as many people as possible (Fiske 326)
• Industrial network that produces many of popular
  cultures resources (326)
• Use (or lack of use) of these products does not
  figure in the definition.

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Popular Culture Characteristic 1

• Use Art of Making Do With What is Available
  (Fiske 326)
• American culture and its people shape and are
  shaped by mass culture and popular culture.
• What Americans use and how they use it
  distinguishes mass culture from popular culture.

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Popular Culture Characteristic 2

• Selection Roughly 80 percent of the products
  of mass culture are rejected by the people (326)
• No universal standard or selection criteria.
• socially located criteria of relevance

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Popular Culture Characteristic 3

• Contradictions Tensions in Use
• Prescriptive/Ideological Norm of the text
• Individual Desires and Needs of the user
• Excess allows the user to poach meanings.
  (Fiske 332)
• Incorporation/Excorporation
• Appropriation/Expropriation

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Key Terms

• High Culture
• Use Not mass produced or meant for mass
  consumption above commercial concernselite.
• Selection Learned or the right people select
  whats in and out.
• Contradictions Tensions in Use Not typically
  seen as antagonistic (Fiske 332)

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Popular Culture
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Popular Culture Traits

• Comprises the space between social norms and
  their application (322)
• Culture of process, not products (323)
• Contradictory (325)

• Bound up with mass culture (325 331)
• Not dogmatic, creative (326)
• Makes do with whats available
• Culture of the here now (334)

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Cant isolate an understanding of popular culture
from its users.
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Popular Culture Interpretation

• Interpretation requires
• A distanced view to uncover the texts
  ideological norms (333)
• An insiders view to uncover the relationship
  between the text and its user (333)
• Snapshots of culture in process.

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Questions?Comments?

• Are there passages in the article you would like
  to look at more closely?