Chapter 3 – A Critical Approach to Popular Culture

Robert WonserSOC 86 - Fall 2011

• According to the critical approach to popular culture, the ascendance of certain kinds of pop culture can be explained primarily in terms of their ability to reflect and reinforce the enormous economic and cultural power of the mass media industry.

Critical Approach Foundations

• “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it” - Karl Marx

Cultural Hegemony

• Gramsci recognized the ideological power of culture as a means of social control, engineers consensus through the power of persuasion.

• Dominance without awareness of being dominated in this case, through pop culture

• Adorno’s critique of jazz and popular music’s “Factory-made” standardization as the root of its “lasting domination of the listening public and of their conditioned reflexes”

Culture Industry

• “Culture now impresses the same stamp on everything. Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part… Under monopoly capitalism all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through.” – Adorno and Horkheimer from “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”

Adorno and Horkheimer

• Rather than satisfying preexisting desires among audiences, the culture industries rely on advertising, popular music, and the glamour of cinema to invent new (and largely useless) desires for consumer goods, all to be fulfilled through shopping and entertainment—thus creating endless markets for the surplus products sold that helped to manufacture the desires for such things in the first place.

Adorno and Horkheimer

• The formulaic amusement provided by popular culture encourages the “stunting of the mass-media consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity,” rendering working- and middle- class audiences so deluded that they overlook the source of their exploitation as underpaid, overworked, and deprived of their autonomy and creativity as employed workers.

The Power of the Culture Industries

• Four major broadcast networks: CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX

• Nearly all music is released through: Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, EMI Group, Universal Music Group

• Publishing: HarperCollins, Random House, Penguin, Simon & Schuster

Seven Parent Companies

• Sony Corporation of America

• Time Warner• Walt Disney

Company• Viacom• CBS Corporation• General Electric• New Corporation

Due in part to their lobbying efforts, in 1996 congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which eliminated many of the caps on media ownership that formerly limited the number of newspapers and radio and television stations a single firm could control

Internet = Diversity of Views?• With all the

options available, we still see most people going to the wealthiest media giants

Most Visited Websites?

1. Google2. Facebook3. Yahoo!4. Youtube5. Amazon6. Wikipedia7. Blogger8. Twitter9. Ebay10. Craigslist

Reproducing Social Inequality

• Our purchases bolster corporations power to greater heights and simultaneously widen the gulf between these enormous companies and their would-be competitors.

• Also widens the gap between nations like the U.S. and third world nations

• Controversial hiring practices• Reinforcing degrading stereotypes of women,

minorities, and the poor in the images they produce

Popular Culture as Social Control

• Cultural hegemony operates at the level of common sense; it is a soft power that quietly engineers consensus around a set of myths that we have come to take for granted.

• Let’s look at some ideas the culture industry puts forth:

Cultural Hegemony

• Ideas propelled by the culture industry:

• Last season’s fashions are so last season – planned obsolescence

• Shopping completes us– Average adult – 48 new pieces of clothing a

year, child – 70 new toys

Cultural Hegemony

• We can all live like celebrities– No longer the Jones’, we evaluate our consumption

relative to reference groups that live financially beyond our own means.

– Americans carry $2.56 trillion in consumer debt, up 22% since 2000

– Average household’s credit card debt is $8,565 up 15% from 2000

– Ironically, this doesn’t make us any happier by only highlighting existing disparities between the middle and upper classes.

Cultural Hegemony

• Our self-worth is determined by our looks and cultural norms of sexual attractiveness – Airbrushed images of perfected bodies

normalize an unattainable expectation of beauty.

Cultural Hegemony and Consumerism

• Brands matter• Connote status• McDonald’s coffee beats Starbuck in

unbiased Consumer Reports taste tests.• Ramones t-shirts have outsold their cds

and records 10 to 1• Average 10 year old has memorized 300-

400 brands• Cool hunters

When Pop Culture Attacks

• The primary motivation for designing programming media and pop culture is money—not creativity, not free expression, not pleasure, and certainly not fun, but the unabashed pursuit of profit.

• Tv shows are what get you to sit through the ads• A softer form of power and a means to

manipulate consumers through advertising, brand exposure and the habituation of fashion cycles.

• Are their logos or jingles stuck in your head right now that you can’t get rid of?