1. Lesson 12: Popular Culture
Robert Wonser
Introduction to Sociology

2. Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture
Lesson Outline
What is popular culture? Popular? Culture?
Interpretive Communities
Theoretical views: Functionalist
Theoretical views: Critical
Theoretical views: interaction
Class distinction and social reproduction
Authenticity
Subculture
Hegemony
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

3. Some notes about pop culture
Pop culture is never the product of a solitary artist but always emerges from a collective activity generated by interlocking networks of cultural creators.
Popular culture is produced, consumed, and experienced within a context of overlapping sets of social relationships.
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

4. What is Popular Culture?
Popular culture refers to the aesthetic products created and sold by profit-seeking firms operating in the global entertainment market.
Popular culture = popular + culture
So, what does popular mean?
So, what does culture mean?
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

5. Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture
1) culture that is well-liked (demonstrated through sales)
2) icons or media products that are globally ubiquitous and easily recognized the world over
3) commercial media that is thought to be trivial, tacky or lowest common denominator; mass culture
4) belonging to the people; folk culture
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

6. Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture
Culture is richly symbolic, invested with meaning and significance.
The meanings attributed to culture are never simply given but are the product of human invention, socially constructed and agreed upon among a demonstrably large number of society’s members.
Finally, for culture to be sensibly understood it must be embodied in some kind of recognizable form.
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

7. So, which opinion is correct?
Meaning, interpretation and value are not ultimately decided by the creators of media and popular culture (though they do have some input), but by its consumers.
Cultural objects are multivocal because they say different things to different people.
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

8. Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture
Interpretation
Audiences draw on their own social circumstances when attributing meaning and value to popular culture.
These meanings are patterned according to persistent systems of social organization structured by differences in socioeconomic status, nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, or age.
These are called interpretive communities
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

9. Interpretive Communities
Interpretive communities Consumers whose common social identities and cultural backgrounds (whether organized on the basis of nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, or age) inform their shared understandings of culture in patterned and predictable ways.
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

10. Theoretical takes on Popular Culture
Functionalist: culture “functions” as the social glue that generates solidarity and cohesion within human groups and societies.
Contemporary collective rituals—hs football games, parades, pep rallies—serve to forge emotional bonds of recognition, identity, and trust within communities and social groups
Allows strangers to communicate with each other in public
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

11. Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture
Emotional Energy
A strong benefit of group membership (society, a cultural group, or subcultural group) is the emotional energy one receives from taking part in social gatherings
Durkheim called this “collective effervescence”
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

12. Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture
Rituals can vary from:
Conversations Religion
Concerts Graduation
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

13. The Importance of Rituals
If people share the same sacred emblems and holy names, the same doctrines, they know they belong to the same ritual community.
They can identify with one another as members of a group that has feelings of collective solidarity and strength.
Even short conversations are mini rituals that affirm one’s identity in a select group and boost our emotional energy.
Sacred symbols also tell us who is not a part of our group.
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

14. Theoretical takes on Popular Culture
Critical: 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.
Top down model with pop culture as a form of domination.
Culture industry
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

15. Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

16. Who’s responsible for your favorite programming?
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

17. Popularity of the Name ‘Kim’
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

18. Theoretical takes on Popular Culture
Interactionist approach: emphasizes the power that informal processes like word of mouth and peer influence enjoy in the cultural marketplace.
Our consumer tastes are deeply affected by those around us.
Which names are common?
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

19. Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture
Highbrow and Lowbrow
“highbrow” and ”lowbrow”
Phrenological throwback when it was presumed brow size (height of forehead) was thought to be a marker of intelligence
Pejorative label—low culture—activites and amusements lacking in virtue and associated with sexuality and the lower half of the body as opposed to highbrow (being more intellectual of course!).
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

20. Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture
Taste and Consumption
Taste – one’s preference for particular styles of fashion, music, cinema or other kinds of culture
Consumption – the reception, interpretation and experience of culture
Do you live in a food desert?
Does social class play a role in determining these?
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

21. The Invention of class cultures
150 years ago Americans enjoyed the same national popular culture consumed and experienced collectively by the masses, by people from all social classes.
What happened? Industrial Revolution
Created a new upper-classes American elite of successful entrepreneurs, bankers and businesspeople.
The nouveau riche descended from common backgrounds, not aristocracy like in Europe.
So initially they drew on trappings of European nobility (family crests, French cuisine, classical art and music)
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

22. The Invention of Class Cultures
Conscious efforts at boundary maintenance and social exclusion.
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

23. Class Status and Conspicuous Consumption
Conspicuous consumption status displays that show off one’s wealth through the flagrant consumption of goods and services, particularly those considered wasteful or otherwise lacking in obvious utility
Upper classes distinctly avoid associations with working class; this reverse is not true.
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

24. Class Distinctions: Conspicuous Consumption
Sweat pants that cost $130, Mercedes vs Hyundai, McDonalds vs Starbucks
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

25. Cultural Capital and Class Reproduction
Cultural tastes have value and can be transferred to others, converted into financial wealth, and ultimately help to reproduce the class structure of our society. This is called
Cultural capital one’s store of knowledge and proficiency with artistic and cultural styles that are valued by society, and confer prestige and honor upon those associated with them.
Unevenly distributed and usually inherited
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

26. Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

27. Popular Culture and the Search for Authenticity
Perhaps the biggest motivator to consume popular culture – authenticity
Authenticity can refer to a variety of desirable traits: credibility, originality, sincerity, naturalness, genuineness, innateness, purity, or realness.
Can never be truly authentic, instead must always be performed, staged, fabricated, crafted or otherwise imagined.
The performance of authenticity always requires a close conformity to the expectations set by the cultural context in which it is situated.
Why is authenticity so important? Is it lacking in our culture?
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

28. Subcultures (Only in Context)
Formation
They could only emerge under the specific conditions and context in which they did
The dominate, mass culture had to exist to rebel against
This dominate culture was a product of middle class post-war affluence and many subcultures are products of the declining middle class and the identity crisis that ensues afterward
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

29. LARP, Straight Edge and Occupy
LARP – Live Action Role Play
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

30. Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture
Consumerism
Consumerism propels the insatiable belief that we need what we do not have
A fundamental frame of reference for relating to oneself, to others, to the environment as a whole
Lagom: Swedish word meaning “the right amount is best”
Do we have a similar word or idea in America?
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

31. Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture
Consumerism
The dominate culture is linked with the consumerist society. Eventually it is exposed as vapid and unable to fulfill individual desires for identity fulfillment.
How unique are you when you like what everyone else likes?
The principle socializing force behind this way of being in the world is television and advertising
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

32. Cultural Hegemony and Consumerism
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
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

33. Cultural Hegemony and Consumerism
We can all live like celebrities
We evaluate our consumption in reference to groups that live financially beyond our own means (rather than our neighbors)
In 2011 consumer debt was $2.43 trillion
Average household credit card debt is $15,799
Ironically, this doesn’t make us any happier by only highlighting existing disparities between the middle and upper classes.
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

34. Cultural Hegemony and Consumerism
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.
Are your armpits unattractive?
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

35. 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
Cool hunters
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

36. Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture
The Sleeper Curve
“The Sleeper Curve” applies to pop culture: the most apparently debasing forms of mass diversion turn out to be nutritional after all.
As Steven Johnson claims, video games provide a locus for the same kind of rigorous mental workout required for mathematical theorems and puzzles.
Improve abstract problem-solving skills
Video games are actually making us sharper and smarter than any other point in the history of civilization.
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

37. Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture
Sleeper Curve
Storyline complexity has increased dramatically and even the best shows from 20 years ago would be regarded as quite primitive were they to air today (compare Dragnet to The Sopranos).
Evidence:
Increase in “multiple threading”
Decline in “flashing arrows”
Multiple threading - having multiple plot points and stories going on at once. For example Community had many story lines going at once. Jeff and britta and annies romantic escapades, abed and troy not growing up, shirly as a single religious mum, ben chang always trying to join the study group, and pierce discovering himself apart from his fathers fortune. Old tv shows tended to have one basic plot per episode. Like I love lucy. They got into trouble or an escapade and it was resolved by the end of the episode
Flashing arrows – really obvious plot points
(a metaphorical audiovisual cue used in movies to bring some object or situation that will be referred later, or otherwise used in the advancement of plot, to the attention of the viewers.)
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

38. Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture
Demographics of U.S. Internet Users, 2010
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

39. Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture
Take Away Points:
Popular culture isn’t ‘good’ or ‘bad’; at least not until it is interpreted.
Pop culture has no inherent meaning.
Popular culture is another vehicle for class reproduction.
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture

40. Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture
For Next Time…
Final Exam!
Be sure to study!
And, Read! (just kidding, only study!)
Introduction to Sociology: Popular Culture