A Critical Approach to Popular Culture

Lesson 3Robert WonserSOC 86 – Popular culture

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According to the critical approach to popular culture, the ascendance of certain kinds of pop culture can be explained primarily in terms of their ability to reflect and reinforce the enormous economic and cultural power of the mass media industry.

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Critical Approach Foundations

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it” - Karl Marx

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Cultural Hegemony

Gramsci recognized the ideological power of culture as a means of social control, engineers consensus through the power of persuasion.

Dominance without awareness of being dominated in this case, through pop culture

Adorno’s critique of jazz and popular music’s “Factory-made” standardization as the root of its “lasting domination of the listening public and of their conditioned reflexes”

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Culture Industry

“Culture now impresses the same stamp on everything. Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part… Under monopoly capitalism all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through.” – Adorno and Horkheimer from “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”

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Adorno and Horkheimer

Rather than satisfying preexisting desires among audiences, the culture industries rely on advertising, popular music, and the glamour of cinema to invent new (and largely useless) desires for consumer goods, all to be fulfilled through shopping and entertainment—thus creating endless markets for the surplus products sold that helped to manufacture the desires for such things in the first place.

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Adorno and Horkheimer

The formulaic amusement provided by popular culture encourages the “stunting of the mass-media consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity,” rendering working- and middle- class audiences so deluded that they overlook the source of their exploitation as underpaid, overworked, and deprived of their autonomy and creativity as employed workers.

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The Power of the Culture Industries

Four major broadcast networks: CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX

Nearly all music is released through: Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, EMI Group, Universal Music Group

Publishing: HarperCollins, Random House, Penguin, Simon & Schuster

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Seven Parent Companies Sony Corporation of America

Time Warner

Walt Disney Company

Viacom

CBS Corporation

General Electric

New Corporation

Due in part to their lobbying efforts, in 1996 congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which eliminated many of the caps on media ownership that formerly limited the number of newspapers and radio and television stations a single firm could control 11

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Why is this trend toward media consolidation troubling?

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Internet = Diversity of Views?With all the options available, we still see most people going to the wealthiest media giants

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Hot topic

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Most Visited Websites?1. Google2. Facebook3. Yahoo!4. Youtube5. Amazon6. Wikipedia7. Blogger8. Twitter9. Ebay10. Craigslist

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Reproducing Social Inequality

Our purchases bolster corporations power to greater heights and simultaneously widen the gulf between these enormous companies and their would-be competitors.Also widens the gap between nations like the U.S. and third world nationsControversial hiring practicesReinforcing degrading stereotypes of women, minorities, and the poor in the images they produce

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Popular Culture as Social Control

Cultural hegemony operates at the level of common sense; it is a soft power that quietly engineers consensus around a set of myths that we have come to take for granted.

Let’s look at some ideas the culture industry puts forth:

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Cultural Hegemony

Ideas propelled by the culture industry:

Last season’s fashions are so last season

• planned obsolescenceShopping completes us

• Average adult – 48 new pieces of clothing a year, child – 70 new toys

• Retail therapy

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Cultural HegemonyWe can all live like celebrities

• No longer the Jones’, we evaluate our consumption relative to reference groups that live financially beyond our own means.

• Americans carry $2.56 trillion in consumer debt, up 22% since 2000

• Average household’s credit card debt is $8,565 up 15% from 2000

• Ironically, this doesn’t make us any happier by only highlighting existing disparities between the middle and upper classes.

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Debt is Actually Coming Down

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Cultural Hegemony

Our self-worth is determined by our looks and cultural norms of sexual attractiveness

• Airbrushed images of perfected bodies normalize an unattainable expectation of beauty.

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Cultural Hegemony and ConsumerismBrands matterConnote statusMcDonald’s coffee beats Starbuck in unbiased Consumer Reports taste tests.Ramones t-shirts have outsold their cds and records 10 to 1Average 10 year old has memorized 300-400 brandsCool hunters

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When Pop Culture Attacks

The primary motivation for designing programming media and pop culture is money—not creativity, not free expression, not pleasure, and certainly not fun, but the unabashed pursuit of profit. Tv shows are what get you to sit through the adsA softer form of power and a means to manipulate consumers through advertising, brand exposure and the habituation of fashion cycles.Are their logos or jingles stuck in your head right now that you can’t get rid of?

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