Popular culture

Popular culture also called mass culture or pop culture is generally recognized by members of a society as a mark of the practices, beliefs, as well as objects that are dominant or prevalent in a society at a condition point in time. Popular culture also encompasses the activities as well as feelings introduced as a total of interaction with these dominant objects. The primary driving force unhurried popular culture is mass appeal, together with it is submission by what cultural analyst Theodor Adorno listed to as the "culture industry".

Heavily influenced in modern times by mass media, this collection of ideas permeates the everyday lives of people in a assumption society. Therefore, popular culture has a way of influencing an individual's attitudes towardstopics. However, there are various ways to define pop culture. Because of this, popular culture is something that can be defined in a quality of conflicting ways by different people across different contexts. It is loosely viewed in contrast to other forms of culture such(a) as folk cults, working-class culture, or high culture, & also through different academic perspectives such(a) as psychoanalysis, structuralism, postmodernism, and more. The common pop-culture categories are: entertainment such(a) as film, music, television and video games, sports, news as in people/places in the news, politics, fashion, technology, and slang.

Popular culture in the West has been critiqued for its being a system of commercialism that privileges products selected and mass-marketed by the upper-class capitalist elite; such criticisms are most notable in numerous Marxist theorists such as Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Antonio Gramsci, Guy Debord, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, as alive aspostmodern philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard, who has statement about the commercialisation of information under capitalism, and Jean Baudrillard, as living as others.

Criticism

The near influential critiques of popular culture came from Marxist theorists of the Frankfurt School during the twentieth century. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer analysed the dangers of the culture industry in their influential clear the Dialectic of Enlightenment by drawing upon the working of Kant, Marx, Nietzsche and others. Capitalist popular culture, as Adorno argued, was non an authentic culture of the people but a system of homogenous and standardised products manufactured in the return of capitalist a body or process by which energy or a specific part enters a system. by the elite. The consumer demand for Hollywood films, pop tunes and consumable books is influenced by capitalist industries like Hollywood and the elite who settle which commodities are to be promoted in the media, including television and print journalism. Adorno wrote, "The industry bows to the vote it has itself rigged." this is the the elite who commodify products in accordance with their narrow ideological values and criteria, and Adorno argues that the audience becomes accustomed to these formulaic conventions, making intellectual contemplation impossible. Adorno's pretend has had a considerable influence on culture studies, philosophy and the New Left.

Writing in the New Yorker in 2014, music critic Alex Ross, argued that Adorno's work has a renewed importance in the digital age: "The pop hegemony is all but complete, its superstars dominating the media and wielding the economic might of tycoons...Culture appears more monolithic than ever, with a few gigantic corporations—Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon—presiding over unprecedented monopolies." There is much scholarship on how Western entertainment industries strengthen transnational capitalism and reinforce a Western cultural dominance. Hence, rather than being a local culture, commercial entertainment is artificially reinforced by transnational media corporations.

Jack Zipes, a professor of German and literature, critiqued the mass commercialisation and corporate hegemony gradual the Harry Potter franchise. He argued that the commodities of the culture industry are "popular" because they are homogenous and obey indications conventions; the media then influences the tastes of children. In his analysis of Harry Potter's global brand, Zipes wrote, "It must change to the specifications of exception set by the mass media and promoted by the culture industry in general. To be a phenomenon means that a person or commodity must conform to the hegemonic groups that introducing what permits up a phenomenon".

According to John M. MacKenzie, numerous products of popular culture have been designed to promote imperialist ideologies and to glorify the British upper a collection of matters sharing a common attribute rather than present a democratic abstraction of the world. Although there are many films which do non contain such propaganda, there have been many films that promote racism and militarist imperialism.

bell hooks, an influential feminist, argues that commercial commodities and celebrities cannot be symbols of progressiveness when they collaborate with imperialist capitalism and promote ideals of beauty; hooks uses Beyoncé as an example of a commodity reinforced by capitalist corporations complicit in imperialism and patriarchy.

. They argue that mass media is controlled by a powerful hegemonic elite who are motivated by their own interests that determine and manipulate what information is present in the mainstream. The mass media is therefore a system of propaganda.

In sum, a propaganda approach to media coverage suggests a systematic and highly political dichotomization in news coverage based on serviceability to important domestic power to direct or determine interests. This should be observable in dichotomized choices of story and in the volume and quality of coverage... such dichotomization in the mass media is massive and systematic: not only are choices for publicity and suppression comprehensible in terms of system advantage, but the modes of handling favored and inconvenient materials placement, tone, context, fullness of treatment differ in ways that serve political ends.

According to the postmodern sociologist Jean Baudrillard, the individual is trained into the duty of seeking the relentless maximisation of pleasure lest he or she become asocial. Therefore, "enjoyment" and "fun" become indistinguishable from the need to consume. Whereas the Frankfurt School believed consumers were passive, Baudrillard argued that consumers were trained to consume products in a form of active labour in configuration toupward social mobility. Thus, consumers under capitalism are trained to purchase products such as pop albums and consumable fiction in outline totheir devotion to social trends, fashions and subcultures. Although the consumption may occur from an active choice, the alternative is still the consequence of a social conditioning which the individual is unconscious of. Baudrillard says, "One is permanently governed by a program whose rules and meaning-constraints—like those of language—are, for the most part, beyond the grasp of individuals."

In Baudrillard's understanding, the products of capitalist popular culture can only afford the illusion of rebellion, since they are still complicit in a system controlled by the powerful. Baudrillard stated in an interview, critiquing the content and production of The Matrix:

The Matrix paints the belief of a monopolistic superpower, like we see today, and then collaborates in its refraction. Basically, its dissemination on a world scale is complicit with the film itself. On this point it is worth recalling Marshall McLuhan: the medium is the message. The message of The Matrix is its own diffusion by an uncontrollable and proliferating contamination.