What is Popular Culture?

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.

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).

What is Popular Culture?

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

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.

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)

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 Game’s ideology?

– Fiske addresses this question when he describes its conservative, patriarchal nature.

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 culture’s resources (326)

– Use (or lack of use) of these products does not figure in the definition.

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.

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”

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

Key Terms

• High Culture– Use: Not mass produced or meant for mass

consumption & “above” commercial concerns–elite.

– Selection: Learned or “the right” people select what’s in and out.

– Contradictions &Tensions in Use: “Not typically seen as antagonistic” (Fiske 332)

Popular Culture

m a ke d o w ith w h a t is a va ila b le

U se

p o w e r o f th e p eo p le no t o f an e lite

S e lec tion

te n sio n s b e tw e en ide o log y an d u ser

C o n trad ic tion

P o p u la r C u ltu re 'sK e y F e a tu res

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 what’s available

• Culture of the here & now (334)

Can’t isolate an understanding of popular culture from its users.

Popular Culture Interpretation

• Interpretation requires– A “distanced” view to uncover the text’s

ideological norms (333)– An insider’s view to uncover the relationship

between the text and its user (333)• Snapshots of culture in process.

Questions?Comments?

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