Popular Culture

• Popular culture (also called mass culture and pop culture) is generally
recognized by members of a society as a set of the practices, beliefs
and objects that are dominant or found everywhere in a society at a
given point in time.
• Popular culture also encompasses the activities and feelings produced
as a result of interaction with these dominant objects.
• Heavily influenced in modern times by mass media, this collection of
ideas permeates the everyday lives of people in a given society.
Therefore, popular culture has a way of influencing an individual's
attitudes towards certain topics.

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Mass Culture
• Mass culture is the set of ideas and values that develop from a
common exposure to the same media, news sources, music, and art.
• Mass culture is broadcast or otherwise distributed to individuals
instead of arising from their day-to-day interactions with each other.

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Popular and Mass Culture
• Interchangeably used but mean different cultures
• Popular Culture
• Mass Culture
• High Art
• Folk Culture

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John Fiske “Culture and Industry”
• A strategy of looking at popular culture from the ground up,
suggesting that those who consume the products of mass culture do
so in ways that can resist the meanings offered them by the
producers of mass culture, and that this product is popular culture.
• “A text that is to be made into popular culture must, then, contain
both the forces of domination and the opportunities to speak against
them, the opportunities to oppose or evade them from subordinated,
but not totally disempowered, positions. Popular culture is made by
the people at the interface between the products of the culture
industries and everyday life.”

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John Fiske “Culture and Industry”
• All popular culture is a process of struggle, of struggle over the
meanings of social experience, of one's personhood and its relations
to the social order and of the texts and commodities of that order

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John Fiske “Culture and Industry”
• He situates the consumer as a producer, not of products, but of
“meanings and pleasures”.
• He suggests these cannot be commodified or consumed, but instead
can be “produced, reproduced, and circulated only in that constant
process that we call culture.”
• “everyday life is the art of making due”
• “At the point of sale the commodity exhausts its role in the
distribution economy, but begins its work in the cultural.”
• “the very success of the bureaucratic commercial order within which
we live has created, paradoxically, the means of its own subversion”.

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