Triangulation essay 1st draft

Danesi, M. Popular culture: Introductory perspectives. Lanham, USA: Rowman and Littlefield. 

·       'Modern-day pop culture [...] is a mass culture, spread widely through the mass media and mass communications technologies. Pop culture would not have become so widespread without the partnership that it has always had with the mass media.'

Popular culture is an atypical form of culture. Fuelled by technological growth, and the seemingly shrinking world, it is more dominant than ever, spreading to all areas of society and subsequently merging high, medium and low brow culture due to the expansion of media outlets. Its intimate connection with education and manufacture, allows for the argument that the culture has become so widespread due to the mass production brought on by industrialisation, urbanisation and globalisation, rather than the media and communication sectors.

Popular culture is a ‘commodity culture’, making it short-lived and highly susceptible to trends, thus presenting its close ties with the media and communications industry. For a trend to exist it has to be spread throughout the general public, hence feeding into the idea that pop culture ‘is culture by the people for the people’ - Marcel Danesi. Danesi goes on to write in ‘Popular Culture: Introductory Perspectives’ about the appealing qualities of pop culture due to it “bestowing on common people the assurance that cultural trends are for everyone, not just for an elite class of artists and cognoscenti. It is thus populist, unpredictable, and highly ephemeral, reflecting the ever-changing taste of one generation after another”. In ‘Rhetorical Dimensions of Popular Culture’ Brummett agrees with Danesi, stating ‘pop culture involves the aspects of social life most actively involved in by the public.’ Popular culture thrives on to the most contemporary characteristics of our lives.  The pervasive media, which has been accentuated by the current technological world, is bringing people, and thus styles, closer than before. Pop culture can thus now be determined by the interactions between people as they participate in societal norms, this includes style of dress – as seen in the punk trends of the 70s or the hippie movement of the 60s; the food eaten – the emergence of fast food chains; use of slang – transmitted through outlets such as grime music; as well as non-verbal language and mannerisms – actions taken from TV fandom for example the ‘Ross Finger’ from ‘Friends’. Documentaries, advertisements of bands, clothing lines all promote new styles. As Danesi rightly explains, ‘Punk culture was really a reflect of the unconscious need for the profane that has always existed in human cultures across time’, and that current day sitcoms like South Park and Family Guy carry on this trend.

Delaney (2007) supports the notion of popular culture reflecting societal developments, and expands the point stating it promotes a collective identity for a ‘large heterogeneous masses of people’. He then goes on to note its ‘inclusionary role in society as it unites the masses on ideals of acceptable forms of behaviour’. This idea can be best exemplified through the news, which feeds relevant information to national or multi-national audiences. As the news can be biased depending on what outlet one watches, it can therefore influence the formation of people’s opinions. In addition, people can call in or email to these outlets, thus allowing for interaction and hence a platform of mass communications for popular culture to thrive within the media. Furthermore, Delaney also expands Danesi’s ‘highly ephemeral’ idea of popular culture as he notes the unsustainability of iconic brands that base themselves on pop culture (e.g. McDonalds or HMV), making them subject to short-term trends, highlighting their uncertainty as they “may rise and fall”. Thus, it is evident the mass media provides a multi-national platform for popular culture to spread such as through music, branding, television and the Internet, making it a mass-culture.

Modern day pop culture has gained a huge amount of influence throughout society, breaking into highbrow academic sectors. Scholar William Reynolds, sites Giroux when presenting the impact of pop culture within youth culture and thus education: ‘television, music, movies, the new technologies of enhanced video/computer games, and, of course, the ubiquitous Internet have transformed ‘especially popular culture, into the primary educational site in which youth learn about themselves, their relationships to others around the larger world’ (Giroux 2000: 108)”. It is important to note that the formation of popular culture originated from the superior attitudes of the elite, which stemmed from the idea that what everyday people studied was unimportant.  As such, the expansion of pop culture in the postmodern period, into universities and amongst scholars represents its transition out of this lowbrow stigma, showing the authority it has gained.

We have also seen the mass culture spread into the academic realms of science, medicine and technology. Joseph Hancock exemplifies this concept in an interview with ‘Intellect’: “look at all the ads on television for pharmaceuticals and how they utilize mass trends to sell medications. Or how Apple created their ‘Are you a Mac or PC?’ campaign, which personified two archetypal individuals in order to sell technology. I do not think there is any discipline that does not use popular culture in some format when educating today’s consumers.” Danesi further supports this idea when noting specialised magazines, such as ‘National Geographic [that] contains information from the worlds of science, history and travel’.

The highbrow vs. lowbrow argument is again present in fashion culture, however nowadays is considered more affected by popular culture due to the growth in advertisement, online fashion and trends stemming from social media outlets (e.g. Instagram and tumblr). Hancock separates fashion into two groups, ‘mass fashion’ (large volumes, exploiting consumer demands for novelty) and ‘couture’ (high fashion). He explains, ‘fashion merchandisers are continuously analysing sales and looking at art, style, design, and people on the street’ thus presenting mass fashion and being more influenced by pop culture, whereas describing couture as more of an ‘artistic endeavour’.

When considering Art, and how this was always classified as an elitist pastime, we again, begin to see the line narrowing between high and low brow culture. Andy Warhol, ‘the unnamed leader of pop art’ (Danesi 2012), ‘showed himself to be a perceptive observer of pop culture trends’. His subject focus of celebrities appealed to the mass audience, rather than a social elite, which ultimately changed the course of art thereafter. Hancock expands on Danesi’s point stating that the distinction between Warhol’s audiences simply depends “on the venue in which his work appears”. Hence, Hancock reveals how consumerism can determine the statute of art; for example Warhol’s work on clothing being sold at a high-street shop compared to a piece hanging in the Gagosian Gallery, paradoxically differentiates and merges pop culture with high art.

Hancock expands, stating “perhaps we should stop making the distinctions and embrace the blending, which ultimately makes both sides of the increasingly artificial binary richer”. This point is perfectly exemplified by gallery gift shops, selling pieces of renaissance art printed onto a glasses case. The institutions are becoming interchangeable, as they begin to rely on each other.  Thus, the mass media outlets have expanded popular culture from an elitist art confinement into a consumerism market.  Indeed, it seems as though popular culture today has merged the barriers of high and low brow, and in turn has enabled this ‘mass culture’ to form. Technological advances have enabled platforms for an all-inclusive culture to thrive, as globalisation facilitates a world where we can all eat, dress and watch the same things, regardless of class. 

The growth of Popular culture was projected by mechanisation and domestic migration, rather than through the influence of the mass media.

Paola Pugliatti writes in the Journal of Early Modern Studies: ‘Since the 1980s, neo-Marxist cultural studies historians have claimed the label of ‘popular culture’ for the sole study of post-industrial commercial phenomena’. At the same time, John Storey agrees, writing that ‘whatever else popular culture might be…it is definitely a culture that only emerged following industrialization and urbanization’ (2001, 13).  Moreover, L.W. Levine (1992) also places popular culture under the realms of productions, labelling it as the study of the cultural products distributed to ‘the people’ during the Great Depression, and their subsequent responses to these consumer goods.

Hence, on the surface, these sentiments reject the idea of the mass media being the driving force of pop culture, and place it on the enormous movement of people into concentrated built-up areas and thus the boom of industry and mass production; or, in Levine’s case, a resolution to stimulate fast economic recovery. Nonetheless, if we consider the huge scale of advertisement and entertainment services that fuel these cities, we begin to realise the prominent impact the media has in both spreading and housing these platforms for popular culture. The rise of the middle class culture brought on by the industrial revolution brought with it mass production, and as Tim Delaney (2007) explains, ‘the emergence of efficient forms of commercial printing representing the first step in the formation of a mass media (e.g. the penny press, magazines and pamphlets)’. 

Thus, it is a combination of industrialisation, the mass media as well as the continual advances in technology that has enabled the huge mega power that is popular culture today, and are factors that continue to shape its mass global spread for now and for the future.

 Bibliography

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