popular culture

Critical positions on the media and popular culture.

What is culture?

As we grow gain culture. Development.

A particular way of life

Works of intellectual. Artistic significant

Culture emerges because of economic relations in society.

Culture rises from base and legitimizes the actions of base.

Raymond Williams 1983

4 definitions of popular.

Lesser of a real culture. Such as art and mass-produced.

Needs a taste setter. Historically the ruling classes are the taste setters.

Class judgment.

Anything aimed for popular culture. Work that is not understandable is for high culture and more important. Elitism compared to simple work for the lower class.

Political position.

·      Well liked by many

·      Inferior kinds of work

·      Work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people

·      Culture actually made by the people themselves

Inferior or Residual culture.

·      Popular newspapers Vs Quality newspapers.

·      Popular cinema Vs Art Cinema

·      Popular Entertainment Vs Art culture.

Mural painters self-taught. Flawed to judge by educated. Class divide.

Society had a common culture and there was a tiny elite culture.

The first time this changes is with industrialization and urbanization\

People are condensed together

Working class and bosses separated

The working classes live in slum areas and the upper-class life is the nice sector of town.

Physical separation

Cut of and ghettoized. They create their own culture. Music, literature, games, pass times.

Working class voice.

Worker movement has the right to vote and have a say in there society.

Matthew Arnold 1867 “Culture & Anarchy”

Culture is? Arnaldism

He tried to define what culture was.

“The best that has been thought and said in the world.”

Study of perfection

Attained through disinterested reading, writing, thinking.

Culture is the force the diseased spirit of our times. Opposite of culture

Anarchy. “Raw and uncultivated masses.”

The working class, Raw and half developed.

Defending upper-class culture against the working class. Attack and patronize the working class.

Leavisism F.R Leavis & O.D Leavis

Similar to Arnoldism

Dumbing down of culture.

Culture has always been in a minority keeping.

the challenge is the rise of popular culture.

Collapse of traditional authority comes at the same time as mass democracy.

Cheap emotional thrills.

•       Popular culture offers addictive forms of ditraction and compensation

•       ‘This form of compensation… is the very reverse of recreation, in that it tends, not to strengthen and refresh the addict for living, but to increase his unfitness by habitutaing him to weak evasions, to the refusal to face reality at all’ (Leavis & Thompson, 1977:100)

Frankfurt School – Critical Theory

Institute of social research

Closed down when the Nazi’s came inoto power.

Moved to university of Columbia New York 1933-47

Got to see the most developed country. Huge consumer culture.

                                    Theodore Adorno

                                    Max Horkheimer

           

                                    Herbert Marcuse

                                    Leo Lowenthal                      

                                    Walter Benjamin

The culture industry.

FORDISM (1910 onwards)

Mass Produced. Culture

“As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished or forgotten”

People expect the same formula of film.

Dish out moral lessons.

Guy end up with girl

Person who has sex will die first in horror film.

Media is just a business, passes through the culture filter.

All Mass culture is identical.

Hubert Marcuse.

Code us in to a certain way of thinking about the world. Only subject to a small range of view. Tunnel vision lives.

Locked into a system.

Codes you into a way of thinking. Crates order. DUMBING DOWN

Denies the opportunity to fight back.

Adorno “on popular music.

Standardization

Reduces free thought.

Social cement

Makes you passive and regulate your behavior.

Dance music wit its insistent rhythm is connotation the rhythm of a factory.

Real culture been lost.

·      Individualization

·      Imagination

·      REAL

Lost

Walter Benjamin

1936

What happens when you can reproduce?

Looses meaning

Technology allows us to see examples of originals.

Detaches the reproduced object from its original domain.

Redefine the meaning of original.

Making high culture into low.