Media, Globalization and Popular
Culture
Index
Culture Theories..............................................................................................................................................................2
Storey, J. (2015) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. Chapter 1: What is popular culture?......................................2
Bourdieu, P. (1996) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Chapter 1: The Aristocracy of Culture...2
Media Fandom and Celebrity Culture..............................................................................................................................3
Jenkins, H. (2012) Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Chapter 1: ‘Get a Life!’: Fans,
Poachers, Nomads.......................................................................................................................................................3
Jensen, J. (1992) The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. Chapter 1: Fandom as Pathology: The
Consequences of Characterization..............................................................................................................................4
Turner, G. (2013) Understanding Celebrity. Chapter 5: The Cultural Function of Celebrity.........................................6
Turner, G. (2013) Understanding Celebrity. Chapter 6: Consuming Celebrity.............................................................6
Ng, E. (2020) No Grand Pronouncements here…: Reflections on Cancel Culture and Digital Media Participation.......8
Turner, G. (2013) Understanding Celebrity. Chapter 1: Understanding Celebrity.......................................................8
Turner, G. (2013) Understanding Celebrity. Chapter 2: The Economy of Celebrity...................................................10
[guest lecture] Wiedlack, K. (2020) Enemy number one or gay clown? The Russian president, masculinity and
populism in US media................................................................................................................................................12
[guest lecture] Goscilo, H. (2012) Putin’s performance of masculinity: the action hero and macho sex-object........13
Brown (2018) Microcelebrity around the Globe. Epilogue.........................................................................................14
Cunningham et al. (2016) YouTube, multichannel networks and the accelerated evolution of the new screen
ecology...................................................................................................................................................................... 15
Galbraith & Karlin (2012) Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture. Introduction: The Mirror of Idols and
Celebrity.................................................................................................................................................................... 15
Jung (2022) Fan Activism, Cybervigilantism and Othering Mechanisms in K-pop Fandom........................................17
Cultural Understandings of Game and Gaming.............................................................................................................18
Cole (2022) Mashing Up History and Heritage in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey..............................................................18
Kivijärvi & Katila (2022) Becoming a Gamer: Performative Construction of Gendered Gamer Identities...................19
Johnson (2021) Behind the Streams: The Off-Camera Labor of Game Live Streaming..............................................20
Muriel & Crawford (2018) Video Games as Culture: Considering the Role and Importance of Video Games in
Contemporary Society. Chapter 2 + 3........................................................................................................................21
Social Issues in Popular Culture.....................................................................................................................................25
Szeman & O’Brien (2018) Popular Culture: A User’s Guide. Chapter 8: Subcultures and Counter-Cultures..............25
,Culture Theories
Storey, J. (2015) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. Chapter 1: What is
popular culture?
Popular culture is always defined, implicitly or explicitly, in contrast to other conceptual categories: folk culture,
mass culture, high culture, dominant culture, working-class culture.
Culture = a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development. A particular way of life, whether of a
people, a period or a group.
Culture means the texts and practices whose principal function is to signify, to produce or to be the occasion
for the production of meaning (eg. poetry, novel, fine art, etc.)
Culture as signifying practices allows us to speak of soap opera, pop music, comics, etc. (popular culture).
5 ways in understanding ideology:
1. Ideology can refer to a systematic body of ideas articulated by a particular group of people.
2. Ideology can indicate how some texts and practices present distorted images of reality.
3. The usage of ideological forms is intended to draw attention to the way in which texts (pop songs, television
fiction, etc.) always present a particular image of the world.
4. Ideology operates mainly at the level of connotations, the secondary, often unconscious, meanings that texts
and practices carry or can be made to carry.
5. Ideology is seen as a material practice instead of a body of ideas.
6 definitions of popular culture:
1. Popular culture is simply culture that is widely favored or well-liked by many people.
However need for a quantitative measure.
2. Popular culture is that what is left over after having decided what is high culture.
What is high culture?
3. Popular culture is mass culture.
Americanization of popular culture.
4. Popular culture is the culture that originates from ‘the people’.
Who qualifies for inclusion in the category ‘the people’?
5. Popular culture is the way in which dominant groups in society, through a process of intellectual and moral
leadership seek to win the consent of subordinate groups in society (hegemony).
Not all dominant groups seek to win the consent of subordinate groups in society.
6. Postmodern culture is a culture that no longer recognizes the distinction between high and popular culture.
This definition places popular culture in a capitalist market.
Conclusion: when defining popular culture we always have to acknowledge that with which it is being contrasted.
Popular culture is not a historically fixed set of popular texts and practices, nor is it a historically fixed conceptual
category.
Context is important.
Bourdieu, P. (1996) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.
Chapter 1: The Aristocracy of Culture
Hypothesis: people in with a higher educational background and in a social origin that values art have better taste
than people with a lower educational background and in a social origin that does not value art as much.
Survey:
Goal: to determine how the cultivated disposition and cultural competence that are revealed in the
nature of the cultural goods consumed, and in the way they are consumed, vary according to the
category of agents and the area to which they applied.
1. The close relationship linking cultural practices to educational capital and to social origin.
2. At equivalent levels of educational capital, the weight of social origin in the practice- and preference-
explaining system increases as one moves away from the most legitimate areas of culture.
The survey took place by questionnaire, carried out in 1963 and 1967-68, on a sample of 1217 people.
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, Conclusion:
The more the competences measured are recognized by the school system, and the more 'academic' the
techniques used to measure them, the stronger is the relation between performance and educational
qualification.
The strongest correlation between performance and educational capital qua cultural capital recognized
and guaranteed by the educational system is observed when the survey takes the form of a very
'scholastic' exercise on knowledge very close to that taught by the educational system and strongly
recognized in the academic market.
In short: the more academically educated you are, the more you know about art in various areas (eg. music, theater,
etc.).
The Titles of Cultural Nobility
The Entitlement Effect = academic capital is in fact the guaranteed product of the combined effects of cultural
transmission by the family and cultural transmission by the school. This effect is one of the mechanisms which, in
conditions of crisis, cause the most privileged individuals, who remain most attached to the former state of affairs, to
be the slowest to understand the need to change strategy and so to fall victim to their own privilege.
The allocation effect = assignment to a section, a discipline or an institution, mainly operates through the social
image of the position in question and the prospects objectively inscribed in it, among the foremost of which are a
certain type of cultural accumulation and a certain image of cultural accomplishment.
This allocation effect and the status assignment it entails doubtless play a major role in the fact that the
educational institution succeeds in imposing cultural practices that it does not teach and does not even
explicitly demand, but which belong to the attributes attached by status to the position it assigns, the
qualifications it awards and the social positions to which the latter give access.
Media Fandom and Celebrity Culture
Jenkins, H. (2012) Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture.
Chapter 1: ‘Get a Life!’: Fans, Poachers, Nomads
Fans and ‘fanatics’
The word ‘fan’ is an abbreviated form of the word ‘fanatic’, which has its roots in the Latin word ‘fanaticus’. The term
‘fanatic’ moved from a reference to certain excessive forms of religious belief and worship to any excessive and
mistaken enthusiasm, often evoked in criticism to opposing political beliefs. Building on the word ‘fan’s’ traditional
links to madness and demonic possession, news reports frequently characterize fans as psychopaths whose
frustrated fantasies of intimate relationships with stars or unsatisfied desires to achieve their own stardom take
violent and antisocial forms. Significantly, if the comic fan and the psychotic fan are usually portrayed as masculine,
although frequently as de-gendered, asexual or impotent, the eroticized fan is almost always female (eg. images of
screaming teen girls).
‘A scandalous category’
Concepts of ‘good taste’ are not natural nor universal; rather, they are rooted in social experience and reflect
particular class interests. These tastes often seem ‘natural’ to those who share them precisely because they are
shaped by our earliest experiences as members of a particular cultural group, reinforced by social exchanges and
rationalized through encounters with higher education and other basic institutions that reward appropriate conduct
and proper tastes. Taste becomes one of the important means by which social distinctions are maintained and class
identities are forged. Taste distinctions determine not only desirable and undesirable forms of culture but also
desirable and undesirable ways of relating to cultural objects, desirable and undesirable strategies of interpretation
and styles of consumption.
Taste is unstable, because it is challenged by the existence of other tastes that often seem just as natural to
their proponents.
Because one’s taste is so interwoven with all other aspects of social and cultural experience, aesthetic distaste brings
with it the full force of moral excommunication and social rejection. ‘Bad taste’ is not simply undesirable; it is
unacceptable.
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