Popular culture studies is the academic discipline studying popular culture. It is generally considered as a combination of communication studies and cultural studies. Academic discussions on popular culture started as soon as contemporary mass society formed itself and the views on popular culture that were developed then still influence contemporary popular culture studies. Cover of Superman #14 This image is a book cover. ... Cover of Superman #14 This image is a book cover. ... This is a list of academic disciplines (and academic fields). ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Cultural studies combines sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology and art history/criticism to study cultural phenomena in industrial societies. ... Mass society is a society in which the concerns of the majority – the lower social classes – play a prominent role, characterized by extension of voting rights, an improved standard of living for the lower classes and mass education. ...

Following the social upheavals of the 1960s, popular culture has come to be taken more seriously as a terrain of academic enquiry and has also helped to change the outlooks of more established disciplines. Conceptual barriers between so-called high and low culture have broken down, accompanying an explosion in scholarly interest in popular culture, which encompasses such diverse mediums as comic books, television and the Internet. Reevaluation of mass culture in the 1970s and 1980s has revealed significant problems with the traditional view of mass culture as degraded and elite culture as uplifting. Divisions between high and low culture have been increasingly seen as political distinctions rather than defensible aesthetic or intellectual ones (Mukerji & Schudson 1991:1-2). The 1960s decade refers to the years from January 1, 1960 to December 31, 1969, inclusive. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Low culture is a derogatory term for some forms of popular culture. ... A comic book is a magazine or book containing the art form of comics. ...

Traditional theories of popular culture

The theory of mass society

Mass society formed itself during the 19th-century industrialization process through the division of labor, the large-scale industrial organization, the concentration of urban populations, the growing centralization of decision making, the development of a complex and international communication system and the growth of mass political movements. The term "mass society", therefore, was introduced by anticapitalist, aristocratic ideologists and used against the values and practices of industrialized society. Mass society is a society in which the concerns of the majority – the lower social classes – play a prominent role, characterized by extension of voting rights, an improved standard of living for the lower classes and mass education. ... Division of labour is the breakdown of labour into specific, circumscribed tasks for maximum efficiency of output in the context of manufacturing. ... Anti-capitalism is any and all opposition to Capitalism. ...

As Alan Swingewood points out in The Myth of Mass Culture (1977:5-8), the aristocratic theory of mass society is to be linked to the moral crisis caused by the weakening of traditional centers of authority such as family and religion. The society predicted by José Ortega y Gasset, T.S. Eliot and others would be dominated by philistine masses, without centers or hierarchies of moral or cultural authority. In such a society, art can only survive by cutting its links with the masses, by withdrawing as an asylum for threatened values. Throughout the 20th century, this type of theory has modulated on the opposition between disinterested, pure autonomous art and commercialized mass culture. José Ortega y Gasset (May 9, 1883 - October 18, 1955) was a Spanish philosopher. ... Thomas Stearns Eliot (September 26, 1888 - January 4, 1965), was a major Modernist Anglo-American poet, dramatist, and literary critic. ...

The theory of culture industry

Diametrically opposed to the aristocratic view would be the theory of culture industry developed by Frankfurt School theoreticians such as Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. In their view, the masses are precisely dominated by an all-encompassing culture industry obeying only to the logic of consumer capitalism. Gramsci's concept of hegemony (see: cultural hegemony), that is, the domination of society by a specific group which stays in power by partially taking care of and partially repressing the claims of other groups, does not work here anymore. The principle of hegemony as a goal to achieve for an oppressed social class loses its meaning. The system has taken over; only the state apparatus dominates. The term culture industry was coined by Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895-1973). ... Max Horkheimer (front left), Theodor Adorno (front right), and Jürgen Habermas in the background, right, in 1965 at Heidelberg The Frankfurt School is a school of neo-Marxist social theory (which is more akin to anarchism than communism), social research, and philosophy. ... Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno (September 11, 1903 – August 6, 1969) was a German sociologist, philosopher, musicologist, and composer. ... Max Horkheimer (front left), Theodor Adorno (front right), and Jürgen Habermas in the background, right, in 1965 at Heidelberg Max Horkheimer (February 14, 1895 – July 7, 1973) was a Jewish-German philosopher and sociologist, known especially as the founder and guiding thinker of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. ... Herbert Marcuse (July 19, 1898 – July 29, 1979) was a prominent German-American philosopher and sociologist of Jewish descent, member of the Frankfurt School. ... Consumer capitalism describes a theoretical economic and cultural condition in which consumer demand is manipulated, in a deliberate and coordinated way, on a very large scale, through mass-marketing techniques, to the advantage of sellers. ... Cultural hegemony is a concept coined by Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. ... Social class refers to the hierarchical distinctions between individuals or groups in societies or cultures. ...

The theory of progressive evolution

A third view on popular culture, which fits in the liberal-pluralist ideology and is often called "progressive evolutionism", is overtly optimistic. It sees capitalist economy as creating opportunities for every individual to participate in a culture which is fully democratized through mass education, expansion of leisure time and cheap records and paperbacks. As Swingewood points out (1977:22), there is no question of domination here anymore. In this view, popular culture does not threaten high culture, but is an authentic expression of the needs of the people. This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...

Roland Barthes' cultural criticism, published in volumes including his 1957 work Mythologies, is one of the key antecedents for later cultural studies.

Image File history File links RolandBarthes. ... Image File history File links RolandBarthes. ... Roland Barthes Roland Barthes (November 12, 1915 – March 25, 1980) was a French literary critic, literary and social theorist, philosopher, and semiotician. ... Mythologies is the title of a book by Roland Barthes (ISBN 0374521506), published in 1957. ...

Contemporary popular culture studies

If we forget precursors such as Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes for a moment, popular culture studies as we know them today were developed in the late seventies and the eighties. The first influential works were generally politically left-wing and rejected the "aristocratic" view. However, they also criticized the pessimism of the Frankfurt School: contemporary studies on mass culture accept that, apparently, popular culture forms do respond to widespread needs of the public. They also emphasized the capacity of the consumers to resist indoctrination and passive reception. Finally, they avoided any monolithic concept of mass culture. Instead they tried to describe culture as a whole as a complex formation of discourses which indeed correspond to particular interests, and which indeed can be dominated by specific groups, but which also always are dialectically related to their producers and consumers. Photo of Umberto Eco by Robert Birnbaum Umberto Eco (born January 5, 1932) is an Italian medievalist, philosopher and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose and his many essays. ... Roland Barthes Roland Barthes (November 12, 1915 – March 25, 1980) was a French literary critic, literary and social theorist, philosopher, and semiotician. ... Discourse is a term used in semantics as in discourse analysis, but it also refers to a social conception of discourse, often linked with the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) and Jürgen Habermas The Theory of Communicative Action (1985). ...

A nice example of this tendency is Andrew Ross's No Respect. Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989). His chapter on the history of jazz, blues and rock does not present a linear narrative opposing the authentic popular music to the commercial record industry, but shows how popular music in the U.S., from the twenties until today, evolved out of complex interactions between popular, avant-garde and commercial circuits, between lower- and middle-class kids, between blacks and whites. Popular music is music belonging to any of a number of musical styles that are accessible to the general public and are disseminated by one or more of the mass media. ... Popular culture, or pop culture, (literally: the culture of the people) consists of the cultural elements that prevail (at least numerically) in any given society, mainly using the more popular media, in that societys vernacular language and/or an established lingua franca. ... A work similar to Marcel Duchamps Fountain Avant garde (written avant-garde) is a French phrase, one of many French phrases used by English speakers. ... Commerce is the trading of something of economic value such as goods, services, information or money between two or more entities. ... An African American (also Afro-American, Black American, or simply black) is a member of an ethnic group in the United States whose ancestors, usually in predominant part, were indigenous to Africa. ... This article does not cite its references or sources. ...

Traces of the theory of culture industry

Still the traditional views have a long life (overview based on Clem Robyns, 1991). The theory which has been abandoned most massively is the monolithic, pessimistic view on the culture industry of the Frankfurt School. However, it is still hotly debated. The criticism raised can be summarized in three main arguments. First of all, the culture industry theory has completely abandoned the Marxist dialectic conception of society. Every impulse, according to this view, comes from above. Resistance and contradiction are impossible, and the audience is manipulated into passivity. Alan Swingewood and others emphasize that the Frankfurt theory has to be seen in the light of left-wing frustrations about the failure of proletarian revolutions early this century, and the easy submission of the European nations to fascism. Cultural pessimism is a significant presence in the general outlook of many historical cultures: things are going to the dogs, the Golden age is in the past, and the current generation is fit only for dumbing down and cultural careerism. ... Max Horkheimer (front left), Theodor Adorno (front right), and Jürgen Habermas in the background, right, in 1965 at Heidelberg The Frankfurt School is a school of neo-Marxist social theory (which is more akin to anarchism than communism), social research, and philosophy. ... Marxism is the political practice and social theory based on the works of Karl Marx, a 19th century philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary, along with Friedrich Engels. ... In classical philosophy, dialectic (Greek: διαλεκτική) is an exchange of propositions (theses) and counter-propositions (antitheses) resulting in a synthesis of the opposing assertions, or at least a qualitative transformation in the direction of the dialogue. ... Fascism (IPA: ) is a radical political ideology that combines elements of corporatism, authoritarianism, nationalism, militarism, anti-liberalism and anti-communism. ...

A second reproach is that this view may be as elitist as its aristocratic counterpart. Both establish the lonely, autonomous, avant-garde intellectual as the only light in a zombie society. Thus the former Marxists arrive at an uncritical praise of the elitist and antirevolutionary upper-class culture. This brings us to a third argument, already made in the sixties by Umberto Eco (1988). In a state-dominated mass society, the lonely, lucid, intellectual Übermensch can only retreat in his ivory tower. The historicity of the contemporary situation is not taken into account, so its internal contradictions are ignored, and thus revolution can only be seen as purely utopian. The culture industry theory, therefore, would lead to passivity and thereby becomes an objective ally of the system it pretends to criticize. Photo of Umberto Eco by Robert Birnbaum Umberto Eco (born January 5, 1932) is an Italian medievalist, philosopher and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose and his many essays. ... Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche The concept of the   — (homo superior; equivalent English: overman, super-human or trans-human; see below) — was expounded by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, whose eponymous protagonist contends that man is something which ought to be overcome. Zarathustra thus announces the coming...

It is of course mainly the influence exercised by the Frankfurt School which matters here: not all of their texts present the same rigid view. In Das Schema der Massenkultur (1973-86:331), for instance, Adorno discusses a "nucleus of individuality" that the culture industry cannot manipulate, and which forces her to continuously repeat her manipulation.

However questioned this view on popular culture may be, it still leaves some traces, for instance, in theories depicting narrative as necessarily ideologically conservative, like Charles Grivel's Production de l'intérêt romanesque (1973). Such theories see dominant ideology as purely a matter of messages, propagated in this case through the forms of narrative fiction. Thus they easily arrive at an exaltation of experimental literature as necessarily revolutionary. However, they may neglect the fact that the ideology is never simply in the message, but in the position of the message in the general social discourse, and in the position of its producers in the social formation. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

Other theories easily yielding to monolithic thought stem from the emancipation movements of oppressed groups. Early feminist theory, for instance, often described society as universally and transhistorically dominated by patriarchy in every aspect of life, thereby presenting a pejorative view of the women they claim to defend. As Andrew Ross (1989) argues, the same remark goes for the widely accepted account of rock history as a continuous appropriation of black music by a white music industry. Only studies analyzing the cultural oppression of homosexuality seem to take a less deterministic position. Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, or philosophical, ground. ... African American music (also called black music, formerly known as race music) is an umbrella term given to a range of musical genres emerging from or influenced by the culture of United States. ... The music industry is the industry that creates, performs, promotes, and preserves music. ...

Contemporary liberal pluralism

In liberal-pluralist accounts of popular culture, the theorizing on its supposedly liberating, democratizing function is nowadays most often pushed to the background. This type of criticism, often produced by people who are also active in popular literary writing themselves, often amounts to paraphrase and suffers from an uncritical identification with the study object. One of the main aims of this type of criticism is the establishment of ahistorical canons of and within popular genres in the image of legitimized culture. This approach, however, has been accused of elitism as well. Elitism is the belief or attitude that the people who are considered to be the elite — a selected group of persons with outstanding personal abilities, wealth, specialised training or experience, or other distinctive attributes — are the people whose views on a matter are to be taken the most seriously, or...

To put it simply: the intellectual, in this view, can fully enjoy junk culture because of his or her high culture background, but the average reader can never raise to the learned intellectual discourse of which he or she is the object. An example of this form of appropriation is Thomas Roberts's An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (1990). Though Roberts claims to take a distance from studies of canonical fiction, he justifies his (implicit) decision to impose canonical models on popular fiction as follows: "If people who read Goethe and Alessandro Manzoni and Pushkin with pleasure are also reading detective fiction with pleasure, there is more in the detective story than its critics have recognized, perhaps more than even its writers and readers have recognized" (1989:5). This illustrates a frequent strategy: the legitimation of popular fiction on the basis of its use of canonized literary fiction, and of the legitimized public's response to it. An intellectual is a person who uses his or her intellect to work, study, reflect, speculate on, or ask and answer questions with regard to a variety of different ideas. ... Genre fiction is a term for writings by multiple authors that are very similar in theme and style, especially where these similarities are deliberately pursued by the authors. ... Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (pronounced [gø tə]) (August 28, 1749–March 22, 1832) was a German writer, politician, humanist, scientist, and philosopher. ... Alessandro Manzoni Alessandro Francesco Tommaso Manzoni (March 7, 1785–May 22, 1873) was an Italian poet and novelist. ... Pushkin may refer to: People Aleksandr Pushkin - a famous Russian poet Apollo Mussin-Pushkin - chemist and plant collector Aleksei Musin-Pushkin - statesman, historian, art collector Other Pushkin, a town in Russia Pushkin Square - square in Moscow Pushkin Museum - fine arts museum in Moscow This is a disambiguation page — a... Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes Detective fiction is a branch of crime fiction that centers upon the investigation of a crime, usually murder, by a detective, either professional or amateur. ... Literary fiction is a somewhat uneasy term that has come into common usage since around 1970, principally to distinguish serious fiction from the many types of genre fiction and popular fiction. ...

Contemporary apocalyptic thought

Marshall McLuhan caused wide irritation with his statement that the traditional, book-oriented intellectuals had become irrelevant for the formulation of cultural rules in the electronic age.

Equally alive is the aristocratic apocalyptic view on mass culture as the destruction of genuine art. As Andrew Ross (1989:5) writes, a history of popular culture is also a history of intellectuals, of cultural experts whose self-assigned task it is to define the borders between the popular and the legitimate. But in contemporary society the dispersed authority is ever more exercised by "technical" intellectuals working for specific purposes and not for mankind. And in the academic world, growing attention for popular and marginal cultures threatens the absolute values on which intellectuals have built their autonomy. Image File history File links MarshallMcLuhan. ... Image File history File links MarshallMcLuhan. ... Herbert Marshall McLuhan CC (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar. ...

In the sixties, Marshall McLuhan caused wide irritation with his statement that the traditional, book-oriented intellectuals had become irrelevant for the formulation of cultural rules in the electronic age. This is not to say that they lost any real political power, which humanist intellectuals as such hardly ever had. It does mean, however, that they are losing control of their own field, the field of art, of restricted symbolical production (Pierre Bourdieu). While in the 19th century, intellectuals managed to construct art as a proper, closed domain in which only the in-crowd was allowed to judge, they have seen this autonomy become ever more threatened by 20th-century mass society. The main factor here was not the quantitative expansion of consumption culture, nor the intrusion of commerce into the field of art through the appearance of paperbacks and book clubs. After all, protecting art from simplicity and commerce was precisely the task intellectuals set for themselves. Herbert Marshall McLuhan CC (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar. ... Pierre Bourdieu (August 1, 1930 – January 23, 2002) was an acclaimed French sociologist whose work employed methods drawn from a wide range of disciplines, from philosophy and literary theory to sociology and anthropology. ...

More important is the disappearance of what has been called the "grand narratives" during this century, the questioning of all-encompassing world views offering coherent interpretations of the world and unequivocal guides for action. As Jim Collins argues in Uncommon Cultures (1989:2), there is no master's voice anymore, but only a decentralized assemblage of conflicting voices and institutions. The growing awareness of the historical and cultural variability of moral categories had to be a problem for an intellectual class which had based its position on the defense of secular but transhistorical values. In critical theory, and particularly postmodernism, a metanarrative (sometimes master- or grand narrative) is a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience (Stephens 1998, p. ...

This brings us to a second problem humanist intellectuals face, that is, the fragmentation of the public. 19th-century intellectuals could still tell themselves that they were either writing for their colleagues, or teaching the undifferentiated masses. 20th-century intellectuals face a heterogeneous whole of groups and mediums producing their own discourses according to their own logic and interests. Thus they cannot control the reception of their own messages anymore, and thereby see their influence on the structuring of culture threatened. Many neo-apocalyptic intellectuals, such as Alain Finkielkraut and George Steiner, emphasize their concern about the growing "illiteracy" of the masses. In practice they seem to be mainly concerned with high culture illiteracy, the inability to appreciate difficult art and literary classics. Alain Finkielkraut (b. ... (Francis) George Steiner, a prominent literary critic, was born in Paris, France, on April 23, 1929. ...

The neo-aristocratic defense of so-called transhistorical and universal human values may also often be linked to a conservative political project. A return to universal values implies the delegitimation of any group which does not conform to those values. It is no coincidence, therefore, that attempts in the United States to define a common "American cultural legacy" tend to neglect the cultures of ethnic minority groups. Or that the fight against franglais (French "contaminated" by American English) in France was mainly fought by intellectuals seeing their traditional position in French society threatened by the import of American cultural products, as Clem Robyns (1995) describes. Franglais, a portmanteau made by mixing the words français (French) and anglais (English), is a slang term for types of speech, although the word has different overtones in the English and French languages. ...

Recurring issues in popular culture studies

The interactions between popular and legitimized culture

The blurring of the boundaries between high and low culture is one of the main complaints made by traditional intellectuals about contemporary mass society. It is hardly surprising then that a lot of studies deal with this topic. There are, for instance, a number of sociological studies on literary institutions which are held responsible for this mix. Among the first were the commercial book clubs, such as the Book-of-the-Month-Club, appearing from the twenties on. The aggressive reactions they provoked are described by Janice Radway (1989) in "The Scandal of the Middlebrow". According to Radway, the book clubs were perceived as scandalous because they blurred some basic distinctions of cultural discourse. In a society haunted by the spectre of cultural standardization and leveling towards below, they dared to put "serious" fiction on the same level as detective, adventure stories, biographies and popular nonfiction. Book clubs were scandalous because they created a space where high and low could meet. This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Low culture is a derogatory term for some forms of popular culture. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... The Book of the Month Club (founded 1923) is a mail-order business where consumers are offered a new book each month. ...

Soon, the term "middlebrow" was introduced to qualify this phenomenon, and to dismiss it as threatening the authenticity of both high and popular culture. A bit after the book clubs came the paperbacks, and their influence was even more wide-ranging. More about this can be found in Thomas Bonn's book (1989) on New American Library. It shows through what elaborate strategies the respectable hardcover editors had to go in order to hide the fact that, from the sixties on, paperback publishers had taken over the control on the production of serious literature. Highbrow is a colloquial synonym for intellectual. ... Look up authenticity, authentic in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

Horror fiction is, broadly, fiction in any medium intended to scare, unsettle, or horrify the reader. ...

The possibility of a "subversive" popular culture

The question whether popular culture or mass culture is inherently conservative, or whether it can be used in a subversive strategy as well, is equally hotly debated. It seems widely accepted that popular culture forms can function at any moment as anti-cultures. "Bad taste" products such as pornography and horror fiction, says for instance Andrew Ross (1989:231), draw their popular appeal precisely from their expressions of disrespect for the imposed lessons of educated taste. They are expressions of social resentment on the part of groups which have been subordinated and excluded by today's "civilized society". Subversion is an overturning or uprooting. ... Taste can refer to ones appreciation for aesthetic quality. ... Pornographic movies Pornography (from Greek πόρνη (porne) prostitute and γραφή (grafe) writing), more informally referred to as porn or porno, is the representation of the human body or sexual activity with the goal of sexual arousal. ... Horror fiction is, broadly, fiction in any medium intended to scare, unsettle, or horrify the reader. ...

The question whether popular culture can actually resist dominant ideology, or even contribute to social change, is much more difficult to answer. Many critics easily read popular fiction and film as "attacks against the system", neglecting both the exact ways in which the so-called revolutionary message is enacted, and the capacities of dominant doctrines to recuperate critical messages. Tania Modleski in "The Terror of Pleasure" (1986:159), for instance, presents exploitation horror films as attacks on the basic aspects of bourgeois culture. Thus a loving father cannibalizes his child, and priests turn into servants of the devil. Other scholars (e.g. Clem Robyns, 1991) claim that, by presenting their perversion as supernatural, or at least pathological, horror films precisely contribute to perpetuating those institutions. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Perversion is a term and concept describing those types of human behavior that are perceived to be a deviation from what is considered to be orthodox or normal. ... The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view. ...

Similarly, many critics exalt stories which feature a lone hero fighting for his ideals against an inert and amoral system. Thus Jim Collins in Uncommon Cultures (1989:30-31) sees crime fiction opposing a smart private detective and an inefficient police force as a critique of state justice. On the other hand, Thomas Roberts demonstrates in An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (1990:173-174), a study of the historical background of the private detective model, how the detective story came into existence in the middle of the 19th century, at the time the institution of state police was developed. This force consisted mainly of lower-class people, but nevertheless disposed of a certain authority over the upper class. The fears among the upper classes for this uncontrolled force were eased by domesticating the police in stories explicitly devoted to them. Their inability to pass on correct judgment was amply demonstrated, and forced them to bow for the individual intellect of the detective, who always belonged to the threatened upper class. Sherlock Holmes, pipe-puffing hero of crime fiction, confers with his colleague Dr. Watson; together these characters popularized the genre. ...

Finally, Umberto Eco's studies on Superman and James Bond (1988:211-256, 315-362) as myths of a static good-and-evil world view should be mentioned as very early and lucid examples of a combination of semiotic and political analysis. Superman is a fictional character and one of the most famous and popular comic book superheroes of all time. ... The James Bond 007 gun logo James Bond 007 is a fictional British agent [1] created by writer Ian Fleming in 1952. ... Semiotics (also spelled Semeiotics) is the study of signs and sign systems. ...

Still, there may be ways to wage revolt in an age of mass media. One way could be to introduce small gradual changes in products otherwise conforming to the requirements of a dominant ideology. The problem here, of course, is that isolated messages get drowned in the discourse as a whole, and that they can be used to avoid real changes. Some scholars, however, describe how opposition forces use the logic of the media to subvert them. In No Respect (1989: 123), Andrew Ross mentions the late sixties Yippie movement. Yippies would stage media events, such as the public burning of dollar bills in Wall Street, thereby drawing heavy media coverage. This politics of the spectacle brought the counterculture right into the conservative media and filled their forms with subversive content. Mass media is a term used to denote, as a class, that section of the media specifically conceived and designed to reach a very large audience (typically at least as large as the whole population of a nation state). ... The Youth International Party (whose adherents were known as Yippies, a variant on Hippies) was a highly theatrical political party established in the United States in 1967. ... Elaborate marble facade of NYSE as seen from Broad and Wall Streets For other uses, see Wall Street (disambiguation). ... In sociology, counterculture is a term used to describe a cultural group whose values and norms of behavior run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition. ...

Whether this strategy is effective or not, it points to an important fact: the mass media are not above, but dependent on the public. As Alan Swingewood states in The Myth of Mass Culture (1977:84), the ideological messages the mass media receive are already mediated by a complex network of institutions and discourses. The media, themselves divided over innumerable specific discourses, transform them again. And finally the public meaningfully relates those messages to individual existences through the mediation of social groups, family networks, etc., which they belong to.

See also

• Popular culture
• Communication studies
• Cultural studies
• Mass society
• High culture
• Low culture

Popular culture, or pop culture, (literally: the culture of the people) consists of the cultural elements that prevail (at least numerically) in any given society, mainly using the more popular media, in that societys vernacular language and/or an established lingua franca. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Cultural studies combines sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology and art history/criticism to study cultural phenomena in industrial societies. ... Mass society is a society in which the concerns of the majority – the lower social classes – play a prominent role, characterized by extension of voting rights, an improved standard of living for the lower classes and mass education. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Low culture is a derogatory term for some forms of popular culture. ...

External links

• Theory.org.uk - "Social theory for fans of popular culture. Popular culture for fans of social theory."
• Communications studies resources - University of Iowa
• Cultural Studies Central
• wikiPOP

References

• Theodor W. Adorno, 1973-1986: Gesammelte Schriften, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
• Houston Baker, 1989: "Handling Crisis", paper read at the Symposium Cultural Literacy in the Media Age: The Clash of Values, at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, August 1989.
• Roland Barthes, 1957: Mythologies, Paris: Editions du Seuil.
• Thomas L. Bonn, 1989: Heavy Traffic and High Culture. New American Library as Literary Gatekeeper in the Paperback Revolution, Carbondale/Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.
• Pierre Bourdieu 1971: "Le marché des biens symboliques", in L'année sociologique 22:49-126.
• Pierre Bourdieu: Ce que parler veut dire. L'économie des échanges linguistiques, Paris: Fayard.
• Jim Collins, 1989: Uncommon Cultures. Popular Culture and Post-Modernism, Mew York/London: Routledge.
• Umberto Eco, 1986: Travels in Hyperreality, New York: Harcourt.
• Umberto Eco, 1988 (1964, 1978): The Structure of Bad Taste, Amsterdam: Bert Bakker.
• Alain Finkielkraut, 1987: La défaite de la pensée, Paris: Gallimard.
• Charles Grivel, 1973: Production de l'intérêt romanesque, The Hague/Paris: Mouton.
• Jürgen Habermas, 1981: Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
• Tania Modleski, 1986: "The Terror of Pleasure. The Contemporary Horror Film and Postmodern Theory", in Tania Modleski (ed.), Studies in Entertainment. Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 155-167.
• Chandra Mukerji & Michael Schudson, 1991 (eds.), Rethinking Popular Culture, University of California Press
• Thomas J. Roberts, 1990: An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction, Athens (Georgia)/London: University of Georgia Press.
• Clem Robyns, 1991: "Beyond the first dimension: recent tendencies in popular culture studies", in Joris Vlasselaers (Ed.) The Prince and the Frog, Leuven: ALW.
• Clem Robyns, 1995: "Defending the National Identity", In Andreas Poltermann (Ed.) Literaturkanon, Medienereignis, Kultureller Text. Berlin: Erich Schmidt.
• Andrew Ross, 1989: No Respect. Intellectuals and Popular Culture, New York/London: Routledge.
• Barbara Smith, 1988: Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory, Cambridge (Mass.)/London: Harvard University Press.
• Alan Swingewood, 1977: The Myth of Mass Culture, London: Macmillan.