ECLI 05

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ESTUDOS CULTURAIS EM LÍNGUA INGLESA
 Lesson 5 : Mass culture and popular culture	 
Tema da Apresentação
 Lesson 5 : Mass culture and popular culture	 
ESTUDOS CULTURAIS EM LÍNGUA INGLESA
Conteúdo Programático desta aula
understand the differences between the key concepts of mass culture, mass society, high culture, low culture and popular culture. 
understand Marxist and neo-Marxist discussions of popular culture in modern society. 
evaluate Marxist ideas on popular culture using the perspectives of interactionism, pluralism and postmodernism.
Tema da Apresentação
 Lesson 5 : Mass culture and popular culture	 
ESTUDOS CULTURAIS EM LÍNGUA INGLESA
Introduction
	Consider the amount and type of media that you encounter in na average day. Perhaps as you wake up you turn on the radio, or you may even wake up to the radio alarm clock. Do you watch breakfast television before leving home? In the evening, is the TV playing ‘to itself’ in a corner of the room while you eat your evening meal, is it switched off, or is yor meal eaten in front of the TV? 
	
Tema da Apresentação
 Lesson 5 : Mass culture and popular culture	 
ESTUDOS CULTURAIS EM LÍNGUA INGLESA
The Role and Influence of Mass Media
	Mass media is communication—whether written, broadcast, or spoken—that reaches a large audience. This includes television, radio, advertising, movies, the Internet, newspapers, magazines, and so forth.
	Mass media is a significant force in modern culture, particularly in America. Sociologists refer to this as a mediated culture where media reflects and creates the culture. Communities and individuals are bombarded constantly with messages from a multitude of sources including TV, billboards, and magazines, to name a few. These messages promote not only products, but moods, attitudes, and a sense of what is and is not important. Mass media makes possible the concept of celebrity:  without the ability of movies, 
Tema da Apresentação
 Lesson 5 : Mass culture and popular culture	 
ESTUDOS CULTURAIS EM LÍNGUA INGLESA
	 magazines, and news media to reach across thousands of miles, people could not become famous. In fact, only political and business leaders, as well as the few notorious outlaws, were famous in the past. Only in recent times have actors, singers, and other social elites become celebrities or “stars.” 
Tema da Apresentação
 Lesson 5 : Mass culture and popular culture	 
ESTUDOS CULTURAIS EM LÍNGUA INGLESA
Today, one can find a television in the poorest of homes, and multiple TVs in most middle-class homes. Not only has availability increased, but programming is increasingly diverse with shows aimed to please all ages, incomes, backgrounds, and attitudes. This widespread availability and exposure makes television the primary focus of most mass-media discussions. More recently, the Internet has increased its role  Today, one can find a television in the poorest of homes, and multiple TVs in most middle-class homes. Not only has availability increased, but programming is increasingly diverse with shows aimed to please all ages, incomes, backgrounds, and attitudes. This widespread availability and exposure makes television the primary focus of most mass-media discussions. 
Tema da Apresentação
 Lesson 5 : Mass culture and popular culture	 
ESTUDOS CULTURAIS EM LÍNGUA INGLESA
More recently, the Internet has increased its role exponentially as more businesses and households “sign on.” Although TV and the Internet have dominated the mass media, movies and magazines—particularly those lining the aisles at grocery checkout stands—also play a powerful role in culture, as do other forms of media. 
Watch this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6zC3q1lbB8
Tema da Apresentação
 Lesson 5 : Mass culture and popular culture	 
ESTUDOS CULTURAIS EM LÍNGUA INGLESA
Popular cultural products
Pessimistic view- see the products of popular culture as a problem to society. They are cheap, unintellectual and have no ‘artistic’ value.
Optimistic view- There is nothing wrong with it and sometimes there is a great value to be had from the consumption of popular culture. In this view the media audience can use popular culture in highly creative ways.
Tema da Apresentação
 Lesson 5 : Mass culture and popular culture	 
ESTUDOS CULTURAIS EM LÍNGUA INGLESA
High and low context cultures
	Is there a fundamental gap between high and low culture? Who decides which works, practices, activities, technologies, etc., are high and which are low? Is today's low destined to become tomorrow's high? Low culture is characterized as the "popular" or unofficial culture-that which society's arbiters of taste despise, cultural pages of newspapers ignore and senators deign to debate. However, this culture overwhelms quantitatively the high culture, the "serious" culture which textbooks and historical presentations uphold as our "cultural heritage." High culture receives money from  
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 Lesson 5 : Mass culture and popular culture	 
ESTUDOS CULTURAIS EM LÍNGUA INGLESA
	
national departments of cultural affairs; its originators sit in academies and societies and are awarded with stipends and Nobel Prizes. Although a minority, high culture is important, as it is associated with the group that by its cultural position wields power over official taste. The guardians of the spiritual and moral high ground seek to protect youth from what is  perceived to be the threat from the low. When debates arise, the line between high and low is shifted, but nonetheless continues to exist even though there are signs that it is becoming less entrenched because of the rapidity of cultural changes taking place within our postmodern, media frantic society. 
Video about low and high culture
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MURoMIqt2d8
Tema da Apresentação
 Lesson 5 : Mass culture and popular culture	 
ESTUDOS CULTURAIS EM LÍNGUA INGLESA
How does Adorno and Horkheimer describe the media?
	Adorno and Horkheimer described the media as a ‘culture industry’ since it does not attempt to create great pieces of art, but is simply a business – an industry – and like any other business it is only concerned with making a profit. When making this claim they had in mind the early Hollywood film industry. The Frankfurt Scholl proposed a ‘hypodermic syringe’ model of the effects of popular culture: the masses, living in a mass society, are passive victims of capitalist ideology – injected with false needs by the media and unable to fight, resist or think for themselves.
Tema da Apresentação
 Lesson 5 : Mass culture and popular culture	 
ESTUDOS CULTURAIS EM LÍNGUA INGLESA
What does Willis suggest about the culture of ‘ordinary people’?
	He suggests that the culture of ‘ordinary people’ is by no means a reflection of passive acceptance of an uncritical low culture, but is highly creative. Willis writes of the ‘symbolic creativity’ of subcultures – especially of youth subcultures – whereby popular cultural products, images and signs are actively manipulated. Willis notes that a massive amount of ‘cultural work’ is undertaken by young people in their everyday lives.
Tema da Apresentação
 Lesson 5 : Mass culture and popular culture	 
ESTUDOS CULTURAIS EM LÍNGUA INGLESA
Willis dismisses the notion that high culture is somehow better than low culture. He argues that the merit of cultural products lies not in what they are, but in how they are used. Since the use to which cultural products are put is not necessarily that what was originally intended, in order to understand the true nature of cultural consumption we need to look at what people actually do. Willis suggests that consumption cannot take place without a massive amount of symbolic action, creativity and interpretation
by consumers. Consumption is not passive – it is based on decoding and reading the signs and symbols of cultural products. 
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 Lesson 5 : Mass culture and popular culture	 
ESTUDOS CULTURAIS EM LÍNGUA INGLESA
Even cultural products that might be deemed ’throw-away’ or ‘profane’ (unartistic) may still offer consumers pleasure, new interpretations and possibilities for free thought. In this view there is no such thing as high or low culture – only degrees of creativity to which cultural products can be put, be they popular or not.
Image of women. Watch this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTlmho_RovY
Tema da Apresentação
 Lesson 5 : Mass culture and popular culture	 
ESTUDOS CULTURAIS EM LÍNGUA INGLESA
How does postmodernity and popular culture link?
Postmodernity and popular culture can be seen as fundamentally interlinked. Jameson locates the emergence of postmodernity in a change in the organization of the economy. Whereas modernity was characterized by the manufacture of products and the use of raw materials, postmodernity – seen as the ‘late industrial era’ – is based on consumption rather than production. Given this, postmodernity is characterized by an unprecedentely rapid expansion in the consumption of popular culture
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 Lesson 5 : Mass culture and popular culture	 
ESTUDOS CULTURAIS EM LÍNGUA INGLESA
Popular culture is therefore seen as a vast and complex, postmodern playground where we re free to play whatever games of meaning and identity we wish.
But in a pessimistic tone, Baudrillard (1983) warns against the rise of the ‘silent majority’. He paints a picture of a postmodern future where populations return to the sort of mass society written by the Frankfurt School. The masses become unable to be interested in, or represented by political ideas, religion, science or any modernist view of a single absolute truth. Instead, all there is let is popular culture, which is 
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 Lesson 5 : Mass culture and popular culture	 
ESTUDOS CULTURAIS EM LÍNGUA INGLESA
consumed in an attempt to try to put some sort of order back into the world, but which in time becomes ‘hyper-real’- more real than real. Popular culture alone remains for this silent majority to use/enjoy/think through. They turn to the flickering images on TV screens, unable to divorce the media from their ‘real’ world of sensation.
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