Samenvatting Kidd (2014): Popular Culture Freaks.
Hoofdstuk 1: An introduction to the sociology of popular culture.
1. Pagina 11: Defining popular culture = this book focuses on the culture associated with
the middle class, which has become so broad as to functionally include all Americans,
even those who are desperately poor or fantastically rich. As a cultural category, middle
class refers to a set of lifestyles that are characterized largely by consumption; the
purchase of goods on the market. Members of the middle class have enough money to
purchase almost everything they need, rather than making these goods at home. But they
do not have so much money that they can commission a craftsperson to make these goods
for them individually.
Culture is shared meaning. These meanings are structured into our languages and the
various other ways that we communicate. Culture is produced within families,
neighbourhoods, schools, and churches – and it is also produced by the entertainment
industry. The culture in this book is that of the culture industry: commercially produced
meanings embedded in expressive works that include text, audio and video. We are
looking at the commercial culture that is produced in a society driven by middle-class
identification, even for those who are very rich and those who are very poor.
a. Pagina 13: The cultural diamond = creator, receiver, cultural object, social world.
b. Pagina 13: Reflection theory = examines the ways that culture reflects the social
world (a reflection of the creator’s experiences and interests and of the intended
audience’s desire).
c. Pagina 14: This book asks questions about the ways the culture industry generates
a wide array of social meanings though the production, content, and reception of
commercial culture objects that, taken as a whole, are consumed by the mass of
society.
2. Pagina 15: Research questions (zie boek) en some preliminary arguments:
a. 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. The
impossibility of popular culture is that it presents us with cultural goals, but the
means to achieve those goals never actually get us there.
i. Pagina 16: Robert Merton’s 5 types of cultural adaption:
Ritualist = those who embrace the means, but never achieve the goals.
So we could say
that contemporary
popular culture
transforms us all
into ritualists. I am
suggesting that the
goals celebrated by
commercial culture
are unobtainable
through the means presented by that culture. Merton’s notion of conformity
simply is not possible.
b. 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.
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, c. The primary way that identity influences popular culture is by creating deep
disparities, which are found especially in the labour force demographics for
production, the quantitative and qualitative representations found in the content,
and the interpretative experiences of the audience.
3. Pagina 18: The Mass Media Matrix = (pagina 22): I refer to the culture industry as a
matrix because of the incredible ways that media conglomerates are interlocked across
production chains, media formats, and the globe. Their size, and the fact that they have no
vested interest in competing with one another, leaves consumers with little influence over
the industry. They are a large and powerful force that feels invisible in many ways.
a. The most important point to note about the culture industry is that it is controlled
by a very small handful of corporations. The 5 major broadcast networks point us
to the powerful role of Comcast, Disney, National Amusements, Time Warner, and
News Corporation. These corporations constitute a media oligopoly:
b. An analysis of the major
media conglomerates reveals 4 key observations that will help us comprehend how
powerful these corporations are and how insignificant the role of competition is for
understanding their activities:
i. Each conglomerate has holdings at multiple points in the chain of
production and distribution. This is referred to as vertical integration:
ii. Each conglomerate has broad holdings within the main media formats. This
is referred to as horizontal integration:
iii. Each conglomerate has broad holdings across the main media formats.
iv. The various conglomerates are interlocked by joint holdings and joint
ventures.
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, c. Pagina 22: Culture industry = Adorno and Horkheimer viewd the culture industry
as the inevitable conclusion of capitalism, which they believed was a cultural
process of turning everything into a commodity. In the authors’ view, the culture
industry sells nothing other than itself- no life lesson, no enlightenment, no new
possibility for the human experience. The institutionalized means never allow us to
achieve the cultural goals.
4. Pagina 22: The Matrix of Identity = Identity is a matrix of social mechanisms and is not
reducible to individual interpersonal interactions, although it certainly has an impact on
those. Identity captures a core aspect of the human experience: the sorting of humans into
groups that give us a sense of belonging and connection and also clarify who is excluded
(and when and why).
a. Identity is a structural principle. It creates the boundaries of social groups and
defines the norms of the people within these groups. Identity is an economic
principle. It creates the basic divisions of labour, determining who will work in
which occupations and how they will prepare for those fields. Identity is a cultural
principle. It creates the central value system that shape what we believe and what
our lives mean.
b. In our time, the dimensions of identity that receive the most attention are race,
class, and gender. The social meanings of racial, class and gender labels are
difficult to change. Performances become scripted and institutionalized, making it
very difficult to significantly alter them.
c. Pagina 23: The key sociological concept that is used when we bring race, class,
and gender together is intersectionality; a concept that refers to the overlapping
effects of race, class, gender, and other dimensions of identity to shape the human
experience by situating the individual within a complex system of stratification.
Although intersectionality creates degrees of privilege and oppression for most
people, it also creates important categories for collective organizing and social
challenge. Intersectionality is defined primarily in terms of race, class, and gender,
but the concept is defined in such a broad way that other dimensions of identity are
easily included as well. Indeed, they must be included to fully understand how
intersectionality works. These additional dimensions include sexuality, disability,
religion, and nationality.
d. When we don’t explicitly identify an intersection, our assumptions are often
directed at those groups who benefit from the dimension of identity in question.
When thinking about gender, whether masculinity or femininity, we too often
focus on whites, people who are straight, people who are not disabled, and those in
the middle class.
i. An important corollary to intersectionality, then, is privilege. Bringing
intersectionality and privilege together allows us to see that most people
experience some level of privilege and some level of oppression. Because
of the important but often-overlooked role of privilege as a mechanism of
inequality, I prefer the phrase “matrix of privilege and oppression” over
“matrix of domination”.
ii. Something that popular culture does to many minorities: reducing them to
one dimension of their identities.
5. The matrix of the culture industry and the matrix of identity are two powerful social forces
that work together to significantly shape modern life.
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