One of the most obvious examples of contemporary communication processes is popular culture. In communication studies, popular culture is studied because it reflects the values, ideologies, concerns, and public issues of the culture responsible for production (Brandt & Clare, 2017; Storey, 2018).
Scholars Brandt and Clare (2018) explain:
As a nation more and more engrossed with media, entertainment and corporate products, our everyday life is often preoccupied with these elements of with these elements of popular culture. Therefore, we must give them the attention they deserve as they prove to be valuable resources in understanding our culture, society, and the world around us. (p. 4).
Popular communication has a profound impact on culture, as well as reflecting culture. Consider the argument that "Star Wars" had major influence on the world. Popular culture can be both a tool for dividing people along ideological and cultural lines, and one for unifying people across cultures.
The Culture Industry
Society has always had popular culture, yet our current understanding of popular culture and popular communication is tied to mass media and the industry that creates products associated with popular culture. In this understanding, popular culture includes books, magazines, television, radio, social media, film, and their industrial production. Other varieties of popular culture products, including those often described as "traditional" popular culture such as theatre, festivals, musical events, ceremonies, and folklore, share a key communication aspect with the mass media products: they are aimed at variable and potentially large audiences. They also reflect many of the same attributes of mass media products.
In particular, all of these popular culture artifacts are the products of the culture industry (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1944/1946). These artifacts are cultural texts, produced within culture, and reflecting the values and ideals of that culture. The culture industry is the mechanism by which popular communication artifacts are produced and created, mediated, presented to an audience, and consumed by the audiences (Brandt & Clare, 2018; Storey, 2018). The resulting products and practices becomes something difficult for individual consumers to recognize as having influence on their daily life, because these products have become so normal in our lives. Consider, for example, your mobile devices and how they have come to be part of your life, part of your expected performance of self, and almost invisible in how "normal" they have become.
The concept of the culture industry comes from the idea that production values, including the messages that are contained in the texts of the industry are determined by studio ownership and capitalist needs. Therefore, mass mediated art is not valuable to society, instead it is valuable to capitalism and, ultimately, U.S. cultural imperialism (Storey, 2018). This critique, arising from the Frankfurt School of cultural theory would become a driving force for understanding the role of popular culture in society in European academic studies.
The Frankfurt School was composed primarily of dissident Marxists who felt that most Communist governments had betrayed the values Marx had taught. Their brand of Marxism was to critique hegemonies and other social forces with a look at the production-consumption cycles of cultural products (Storey, 2018). They looked at the forces of society as if they were factories producing culture that would be sold to the people who were actually working for the industry—the masses. Mass culture was produced in mass quantities, and advertisers and marketing professionals continually sought new ways to sell these products to masses of consumers.
In 1944 Adorno and Horkheimer criticized American popular culture as a form of mass culture that was ruining what they saw as “authentic culture.” Authentic culture, for Adorno and Horkheimer, is the concept of culture emerges from those in the margins, or people outside of mainstream society (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1944/1946; Storey, 2018). For example, Appalachian music and folk art would be what these authors claimed as authentic culture. Writing from a Marxist perspective, Adorno and Horkheimer explained that authentic culture is art that can resist hegemony, which is a form of socio-political influence that reinforces the dominant power structures in society. For example, patriarchy and Whiteness are forms of hegemony. The authors argue that “mass culture,” in contrast, is art that can only reproduce hegemonic values, and therefore is not as valuable as authentic culture.
Adorno and others in the Frankfurt school argue that products of mass communication create an artificial sense of well-being that contrasted with the suffering of human beings everywhere (Storey, 2018). The authors argue that mass culture products, such as Hollywood film and popular music tended to be formulaic and simple, therefore driving down the need for audiences to interpret the art forms with creativity and intelligence.
The formulaic nature of popular culture encourages familiarity in audiences, as well as a comfort level. The culture industry, as discussed by Adorno and Horkheimer (1944/1946), gives us a false sense of security and consumerist rationality that lures us into the idea that by spending on consumer products we will somehow become safer, happier people.In other words, mass or popular culture helps to "dumb down" audiences and keep them from realizing how manipulated they are. It generates false versions of beauty and truth and convinces us that if we purchase the cultural products that have created this on screen, somehow it will become a truth for us. The authors warn that we are in danger of becoming homogenized, matching drones for the wealthy to manipulate (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1944/1946; Storey, 2018).
Today’s popular culture involves communication technologies including television, film, and social media. These technologies include news media, entertainment forms, music production, and speech forums. Popular culture is not limited to technological media forms, however. Popular culture includes theatre, folklore, urban myths, fashion, advertising, tourism, and leisure activities. As you can no doubt tell, popular culture includes a vast number of activities that each of us engages in on a regular basis…and each of these activities involve communication practices.
As media forms change, understandings of popular culture and popular media also change.
The study of popular culture, like the study of communication, is not new. While the communication technologies change, the role of popular communication in daily life has always been relevant. Folklore and dramatic studies, in some regard, date back to the earliest days of history and rhetoric. Bards and storytellers passed mythic stories down through generations in communities as part of the process of maintaining cultural norms (Burke, 1978). The collection of folktales collected by the Brothers Grimm is one example of academic research into the myths and tales that help to shape and define communities. As folklorist Alan Dundes (1964) argues, the texts, textures, and contexts of folklore are the components that construct cultures. These examples are therefore all components of mass communication (Campbell, Martin & Fabos, 2017).
Like so many of the other communications fields, contemporary popular culture studies developed in the mid-twentieth century and was greatly impacted by the social movements of that era. Studies in this field cover the range of communication research paradigms and methodologies, and share roots with the academic fields of Cultural Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Folklore, and Sociology. In fact, the scope of the field is challenged by the lack of a singular definition for popular culture, as it is viewed from within these separate fields and traditions in a variety of ways.
In communication studies, behaviorists most often approach popular culture as mass culture, or culture produced for the largest portion of society (Hanson, 2017; Merrigan & Houston, 2015). These studies generally focus on mass media and audience analyses, with the goal of predicting and controlling audience behavior. These studies are particularly useful in business and marketing fields, advertising, and sales. Interpretive approaches traditionally define popular culture as folk culture or working-class culture in contrast with high culture or upper-class culture (Merrigan & Houston, 2015; Storey, 2018). While most current interpretive studies no longer make the clear distinction between high and low art forms, the tradition still plays a role in distinguishing mass-produced cultural products from popular culture that emerges from local identities. From a critical approach, there is an implication that popular culture exists as dominant culture, or a means of social control (Gibson & Hartley, 1998; Merrigan & Houston, 2015; Storey, 2018). This argument, in fact, is one of the places where contemporary studies in the field originated.
These labels, however, are not mutually exclusive. Consider the following image.
Would you identify Shakespeare's work today as popular culture? As high art? As folk culture? Shakespeare was an icon of popular culture in his day? He wrote for the London public, as well as for royalty. His work was considered both entertainment and social critique in his time. Does Shakespeare reflect contemporary dominant culture and values? If you have seen a film version of one of Shakespeare's plays does the filmed version make a difference in your opinion?
References
Adorno, T., & Horkheimer, M. (1946). The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception. In S. During, (Ed.). The cultural studies reader. New York: Routledge. Original work published 1944.
Brandt, J., & Clare, C. (2018). An introduction to popular culture in the US: People, politics, and power. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Burke, P. (1978). Popular culture in early modern Europe. New York: Harper & Row.
Campbell, R., Martin, C.R., & Fabos, B. (2017). Media & culture: Mass communication in a digital age (11th edition). Boston, MA: Bedford/St, Martin's.
Dundes, A. (1964). Texture, text, and context. Southern Folklore Quarterly, 28(4), 251-265.
Gibson, M., & Hartley, J. (1998). Forty years of cultural studies: An interview with Richard Hoggart, October 1997. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 1(1), 11-23. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/136787799800100102
Merrigan, G. & Huston, C.L. (2015). Communication research methods (3rd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
Storey, J. (2018). Cultural theory and popular culture: An Introduction (8th ed.). New York: Routledge.
