Class notes
Media, Globalization & Popular Culture lecture notes
- Course
- Institution
Lecture notes of 34 pages for the course media, globalization & popular culture at UVT
[Show more]
Seller
Followtaravandijk
Content preview
MEDIA, GLOBALIZATION & POPULAR CULTURELECTURE 1 - 28/01/2020
Global trends, local entertainment industries & sociocultural contexts complicate our understandings on
popular culture.
Pagina 1 van 34
, LECTURE 2 - 04/02/2020
Outline
• What is culture?
• “Popular culture” in your cultural contexts?
• Taking “popular culture” as an object of academic study
• Conservative and elitist critics British
• Culturalism
• Implication: why do we care about culture being “popular”
• Summary: 6 de nitions of popular culture
• Ideology is connected to culture
What is culture?
Raymond Williams (1983)
1. A general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development
2. A particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group
3. The texts and practices whose principle function is to signify, to produce or to be the occasion for
the production of meaning
“Popular culture” in your cultural contexts?
• How to de ne pop culture?
• Beliefs, tastes, practices of ordinary people arise from consumerism
• “short-lived”, “5-seconds of fame”, “clout chaser”, “clickbait fanatic”
• The temporality of trends: pre-digital & now
• Is pop culture a type of culture?
• Why don’t I like pop culture?
• No lasting e ects; to succeed nancially, but not to better the lives of people
• Exaggerated representation, one beauty standard
• Social reception
• American in uence ➝ Western Europe
• Celebrities are overseas people
• Older generations do not like them
• Localization & globalization
• Conspiracy theories: tittytainment & CIA’s in uence on Japanese pop culture industry
Taking “popular culture” as an object of academic study
Elitist critics:
• Matthew Arnold: Culture and Anarchy (1867-9)
• Open a space for studying popular culture
• A particular perspective on popular culture, in uential until 1950s
• Culture:
• The best that has been thought and said in the world
• To make reason and the will of God prevail
• Getting our countrymen in seeking culture
↳ Working class lived culture: problematic
• “marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes” ➝ he
thought of it as anarchy
• Su rage of male urban working class (1867)
• Barbarians (aristocracy)
• Philistines (middle class)
• Seen as eternal spirit, human nature: ignorance, passion, envious
• Populace (working class)
↳ Two functions of culture:
• Guide the middle class & aristocracy from the unwanted eternal spirit
• Bring a principle of authority to the working class
↳ Education is the road to culture
Pagina 2 van 34
ff fi flff fi fi fl fl
, • Teach the working class subordination & deference
• For middle class, to prepare them for the power that is to be theirs.
↳ Popular culture: symptomatic of a profound political disorder
• Arnold’s main concern: restore social order, social authority and win through cultural subordination and
deference.
• Leavisism: E.R. Leavis, Q.D. Leavis, Denys Thompson (1930s-1970s)
• Identi ed problem:
• Culture decline since 20th century: standardization and leveling down.
• Justi cation & argument:
• But, culture has always been in the minority keeping
• E.g. the democratic sentiments in literary taste (popular vote)
• Literary taste should be controlled, but people buy the book that’s most popular, often romantic
ction
• Romantic ction: drug addiction, a habit of fantasying, maladjustment in actual life
• The golden age of culture: 17th Century, mythical rural past, a shared cultural uncorrupted by
commercial interests
• E.g. the Elizabethan period of Shakespeare’s theatre.
• appeal to the cultivated and the populace at the same time
• The masses receive their amusement from above.
• cultural coherence based on authoritarian and hierarchical principles
↳ Now: educate the public through great literature
↳ For both Arnold & Leavisism: popular culture signi es culture decline and political disorder
• Reaction towards vast social changes in early 20s century
• Industrialization and urbanization
• Working class in formal politics
• Media technologies
- How to incorporate the working class in society?
Culturalism (1950s)
• Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, Stuart Hall
• Institutionalization of “culturalism” at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1964)
• The social perspective on cultural texts
• Reconstitute the patterned behavior & constellations of ideas
• Human agency in making culture
• Raymond Williams: The Analysis of Culture
• Culture as
1. A state or process of human perfection
2. A body of intellectual and imaginative work, document human thoughts and experiences
3. A particular way of life, express certain value/meanings
• Lived experience of ordinary men and women, made in their daily interaction with the texts and
practices of everyday life.
• Democratizing the de nition of culture
• Space for the study of TV shows, vlogs, clubbing as culture
• Structure of feeling: the shared values of a particular group, class or society. A structure that is a cross
between a collective cultural unconscious and an ideology.
• Norms, but:
• no one lives 100% according to the norms.
• Contradiction, compromise, resistance and subversion
↳ Structure of feeling: how norms are lived & experienced by people with their agency.
- e.g. Jane Eyre
- Edward Rochester
- Bertha Antoinetta Mason
- The ethics vs experiences
Pagina 3 van 34
fi fifi fi fi fi
, - How men & women are released from loveless marriages
- Unexpected legacies
- Poor man becomes rich after returning from the colonies.
• Richard Hoggart: The Use of Literacy
• The traditional lived working class culture of the 1930s
• Commercialized mass culture provided for the working class 1950s
• Position: “I know contemporary working class is deplorable, but mine was di erent”
• Working class culture aesthetics:
• Art as escape, not connected to the matter of the day
• Interest in the close detail of the everyday, in the already known, a taste for culture that shows rather
than explores.
• Not escape from ordinary life, but intensi cation of it.
↳ Communal and self-made culture vs. commercially produced entertainment for the working class.
• But people appropriate entertainment products for their own purposes.
• E.P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class (1963)
• The experiences of workers.
• The working class people and their culture are not only the result of economic and political process, but
are also themselves an active part in it
• The account of doings of the great and the worthy
• Paul Willis, Learning to Labor
• Ethnographic study of working class boys at a secondary school in England
• Youth culture and socialization as medium through which the school routes working class students to
working class jobs.
• The lads’ rebellious culture against school disciplines
• Take youth culture seriously
Implication: why care about “popular”
• Popular culture as sociological & anthropological phenomenon
• A question of the sovereignty of a nation-people
• i.e. Which group within the society takes control of representation
• The academic concern of popular culture addresses issues of social & technological transformation
starting from 20th Century.
• Now? Emergence of a new class? Precarious (unstable) class? Emergence of short term contracts, no
long term or stable career
De nition Problem
Well-favored How ‘popular’ is enough
Inferior culture Taste as marker for class, not xed for all time,
Commercialized mass culture Romanticization of the past
Folk culture of the people Who are the people; the commercial nature of the
resources for making folk culture
Popular culture as “the other”
De nitions of popular culture
Hegemony theory: terrain for ideological struggle between dominant and subordinate class, dominant and
subordinate cultures.
• Dominant groups in society win the consent of subordinate groups through intellectual and moral
leadership.
• slash, fans’ concern on gender & sexuality normativity
• celebrity gossip
Pagina 4 van 34
fifi
fi fi ff
The benefits of buying summaries with Stuvia:
Guaranteed quality through customer reviews
Stuvia customers have reviewed more than 700,000 summaries. This how you know that you are buying the best documents.
Quick and easy check-out
You can quickly pay through credit card or Stuvia-credit for the summaries. There is no membership needed.
Focus on what matters
Your fellow students write the study notes themselves, which is why the documents are always reliable and up-to-date. This ensures you quickly get to the core!
Frequently asked questions
What do I get when I buy this document?
You get a PDF, available immediately after your purchase. The purchased document is accessible anytime, anywhere and indefinitely through your profile.
Satisfaction guarantee: how does it work?
Our satisfaction guarantee ensures that you always find a study document that suits you well. You fill out a form, and our customer service team takes care of the rest.
Who am I buying these notes from?
Stuvia is a marketplace, so you are not buying this document from us, but from seller taravandijk. Stuvia facilitates payment to the seller.
Will I be stuck with a subscription?
No, you only buy these notes for $3.74. You're not tied to anything after your purchase.
Can Stuvia be trusted?
4.6 stars on Google & Trustpilot (+1000 reviews)
53068 documents were sold in the last 30 days
Founded in 2010, the go-to place to buy study notes for 14 years now