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Summary: Pop Culture Freaks: identity, mass media, and society (Dustin Kidd)
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Full book summary in English (H1 to H8). Second edition.
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Samenvatting Boek MECPop Culture Freaks: Identity, Mass media and Society (Kidd)
Periode 4 - BA2
,Chapter 1 - An Introduction to the Sociology of Popular Culture
Losers, strangers and freaks
The world of popular culture has a way of telling us we do not fit in, and then turning
around and selling us a ticket to conformity.
Being fired (by your boss or by popular culture) means being denied full participation in
the social milieu while still living within it. This book is about the intersection of identity
(the associations that make us who we are and give us a sense of belonging to the tribe)
and popular culture, the somewhat mechanical set of meanings and values that dominate
our world, regardless of our tribal membership.
Why freaks? —> Freak is an insult that has never attached itself to any particular group.
Anyone is susceptible for being called a freak. The word freak is embrace because:
1. Kidd believes that we operate within a commercial culture system that treats us all as
freaks;
2. To embrace our freak status may provide us with the tools to find some agency within
that system and have some control over how the culture industries influence our lives.
Defining popular culture
Popular culture = the culture of “the people”, which can refer to either folk culture or
commercial culture.
Historical common terms: High culture (excluded a tiny group of ruling elites) and Folk
culture (everyone else) —> also named Low culture (places the emphasis on a cultural
hierarchy).
But also, Mass culture = refers to the idea that everyone shares the same mass-
produced culture.
If popular means the people (latin), then popular culture could be associated with folk
culture, low culture or mass culture.
This book focuses on the culture of the middle class, which has become very large.
Culture: may refer to sacred elements of society. But in sociological analysts this is much
broader than just high culture and much bigger than just the sacred, it is also everyday —
> it is shared meaning.
The culture in question in this book is that of the culture industry: commercially produced
meanings embedded in expressive works that include test, audio and video.
—> Commercial culture that is produced in a society driven by middle-class
identification.
Commercial culture separaties the formation and reception processes in very clears ways:
Formation = the process of making a cultural object, refers to both the production
(economic dimension) and creation (artistic dimension, meaning);
Reception = the ways that audiences receive a cultural good, refers to both
consumption (how we access and select a cultural good) and interpretation (how we
determine what the cultural good means and how we act on those meanings).
Wendy Griswold —> Cultural diamond:
Social world = the totality of the community in which the cultural object
acts.
—> cultural objects are connected to the larger social world through
both production/creation and reception.
, Reflection theory = a sociological approach to literature and other forms of cultural
objects, examines the ways that culture reflects the social world.
Audience members are limited by the available interpretations of the content and by the
personal experiences they bring to the viewing. These interpretations and experiences
generate what is called a tool kit.
The functions of popular culture
Kidd contends that popular culture serves five major social functions:
1. Popular culture generates basic social norms;
2. Popular culture produces social boundaries;
3. Popular culture produces rituals that generate social solidarity —> solidarity is the
basis of social cohesion;
4. Popular culture generates innovation;
5. Popular culture generates social progress
Popular culture is a means by which culture generates profit (capitalism). But once in
place, popular culture then co-opts many other important social functions.
Research questions and arguments
Research question Kidd: “What is the relationship between popular culture and identity”?
—> “How does identity influence popular culture”?
To answer this question, we need to make our way around the cultural diamond: from the
social world, to production, to cultural objects, to audiences, and back again to the social
word, to see where and how identity shows up at each point.
Focus on five dimensions of identity: race, class, gender, sexuality and disability. These
are collective, rather than individual.
—> “How do race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability influence the production,
content, audience, and social world for television, music, film, magazines, books, and the
Internet, both in the United States and abroad”?
Preliminary arguments to answer this question:
1. Popular culture serves the dual and contradictory role of integrating us into the social
world while also insisting that we have failed to fully integrate. We are invited into the
mass media matrix, but after accepting that invitation we are constantly made to feel
that we do not deserve to be at the party;
2. Production, content, and reception are deeply connected and are deeply embedded
in the larger social world, so any attempt to understand popular culture without paying
attention to all four points of the cultural diamond is inevitably flawed;
3. The primary way that identity influences popular culture is by creating deep
disparities, which are found especially in the labor force demographics for production,
the representation found in the content, and the experiences of the audiences.
The mass media matrix
The most important point to note about the culture industry is that it is controlled by a
very small handful of corporations.
—> Oligopoly = an industry that is controlled by a small handful of corporations that are
functionally no longer competing with one another.
Key words for understanding Media Consolidation:
Vertical integration = a cost-saving method for businesses that involves controlling
every aspect of the creation and distribution process.
Horizontal integration = a cost-saving method for a business that involves controlling
every higher proportions of the market production within a field.
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