MASS CULTURE

Sociologyindex, Sociology Books 2009

Mass culture refers to how culture gets produced, whereas popular culture refers to how culture gets consumed. Mass culture is culture which is mass produced, distributed, and marketed. 

"Mass Culture" is a set of cultural values and ideas that arise from common exposure of a population to the same cultural activities, communications media, music and art, etc. 

Mass culture becomes possible only with modern communications and electronic media. 

A mass culture is transmitted to individuals, rather than arising from people's daily interactions, and therefore lacks the distinctive content of cultures rooted in community and region. 

Mass culture tends to reproduce the liberal value of individualism and to foster a view of the citizen as consumer.

Adorno’s extended conception of ‘culture industry’ renders the usual criticism of his views as ‘elitist’ meaningless. Adorno was among the radical critics of mass culture. Adorno developed a critical methodology to analyze the production, texts, and reception of the artifacts of what became known as "popular culture," thus anticipating the approach of later forms of "cultural studies." Along with Max Horkheimer, Adorno developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) the first critical theory which discerned the crucial roles of mass culture and communication in contemporary capitalist societies. 

Adorno and his colleagues, emigrants from Nazi Germany, observed the use of mass culture in German fascism and were shocked to see in the United States the same sort of ideological culture which reproduced the existing social relations and served as propaganda for the established socio-economic and political order.

The Bohemianization of Mass Culture 
Elizabeth Wilson, University of North London, UK 
International Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1, 11-32 (1999) © 1999 SAGE Publications
This article charts the development of the idea of 'bohemia' and the 'bohemian' from its emergence in the 1830s to the present day. I suggest that whereas the discourse surrounding bohemianism was one of authenticity versus the falseness and commercialization of mass culture, the figure of the bohemian was always discursively produced in popular culture from Henry Murger onwards, bohemians becoming the subject matter of numerous salon paintings, popular fiction, films and journalism. It is further argued that far from being extinct, bohemian values of expressiveness, sexual experimentation, radicalism and an aesthetic approach to life have become the mainstay of mass culture. This raises the question of whether the contested divide between 'High Art' and 'Mass Culture', much debated within cultural studies since the 1970s, is still as salient as we assume. - ics.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/2/1/11

Meaning and Mass Culture: The Search for a New Literacy 
Tim Vincent 
Journal of Communication Inquiry, Vol. 23, No. 2, 152-162 (1999) DOI: 10.1177/0196859999023002004 © 1999 SAGE Publications
The present mass culture can be characterized by its resistance to meaning or, perhaps more accurately, its resistance to a clear separation between information and meaning. A central goal of literacy education will be to develop minds that can create meaning, not merely become more proficient at processing received information. Faced with the trend toward corporate takeover of culture—begun in earnest in the 1930s and reaching global proportions today—where can educators turn for help in the search for a new literacy that can begin to address the struggle for control of culture that will be a central issue for democratic societies in the years ahead? - jci.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/23/2/152

Adorno and Mass Culture: Autonomous Art Against the Culture Industry 
György Markus, University of Sydney, george.markus@arts.usyd.edu.au 
Thesis Eleven, Vol. 86, No. 1, 67-89 (2006) DOI: 10.1177/0725513606067786 © 2006 Thesis Eleven Pty, Ltd., SAGE Publications
Adorno’s extended conception of ‘culture industry’ renders the usual criticism of his views as ‘elitist’ meaningless. The same expansion creates, however, logical strains and contradictions in his analysis of the character and function of the culture industry: a strain in its ‘psychosocial’ and ‘status compulsion’ interpretation. In his late work Adorno attempts to solve this contradiction, but at a heavy price, by creating a conceptual barrier between pleasure and happiness. - the.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/86/1/67

Soviet Sport and Transnational Mass Culture in the 1930s 
Barbara Keys, Woodrow Wilson International Center's Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington DC. 
Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 38, No. 3, 413-434 (2003) DOI: 10.1177/0022009403038003005 © 2003 SAGE Publications
As an international system of competitive, achievement-oriented sport developed into one of the interwar period's most potent carriers of transnational mass culture, the Soviet Union initially chose not to participate. Ideologically hostile toward capitalist internationalism and suspicious of international cultural influences, the Soviet regime instead attempted to create an alternative international system of `proletarian sport' that eschewed record-seeking and individualism. In the 1930s, however, the political benefits of participation in `capitalist' sport (including the opportunity to influence foreign public opinion and to project images of national power) drew the Soviet Union into participation. Although `capitalist' sport was modified in the Soviet context, a reciprocal `sportification' of Soviet physical culture also occurred, as the process of cultural transfer embedded the Soviet Union in transnational cultural flows that sometimes served to subvert Soviet ideology. - jch.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/38/3/413

Terminators, Monkeys and Mass Culture: The carnival of time in science fiction films 
Angela Dimitrakaki, University of Southampton, UK 
Miltos Tsiantis, University of Oxford, UK 
Time & Society, Vol. 11, No. 2-3, 209-231 (2002) © 2002 SAGE Publications
This article is concerned with time in science fiction films. Our contention is that the current fascination with the time travel motif can be understood in terms of an oppositional cultural narrative running counter to dominant forms of temporality within capitalism. Such a reading allows us to negotiate the wide (mass) appeal of films based on the time travel motif without resorting to the primal scene fantasy. Our argument challenges the views which dismiss mass culture as merely escapist. Specifically, we argue that the potentially subversive element of time travel films lies precisely in a particular conceptualization and experience of time and history as cyclical and in flux. This understanding of time is antithetical to the temporalities generated within late capitalist societies where time emerges as both linear and fragmented. Through the reading of films such as 12 Monkeys, Terminator and others we attempt to show that time in this context entails a possibility of intervention in history (both personal and social) and is presented as non-linear and non-teleological. - tas.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/2-3/209-a

Effective Democracy, Mass Culture, and the Quality of Elites: The Human Development Perspective 
Christian Welzel 
International University Bremen (IUB), School of Humanities and Social Sciences, P.O. Box 750 561, D - 22725 Bremen, Germany 
International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Vol. 43, No. 3-5, 317-349 (2002) DOI: 10.1177/002071520204300306 © 2002 SAGE Publications
This article demonstrates that low corruption and high female representation are two characteristics of elite quality that go closely together and help make "formal" democracy increasingly "effective." However, the quality of elites is not an inherently independent phenomenon but is shaped by a pervasive mass factor: rising self-expression values that shift cultural norms toward greater emphasis on responsive and inclusive elites. Self-expression values, in turn, tend to be strengthened by growing human resources among the masses. Considered in a comprehensive perspective, these various components are linked through the emancipative logic of Human Development: (1) human resources, (2) self-expression values, (3) elite quality, and (4) effective democracy all contribute to widen the scope of human autonomy and choice in several aspects of people’s lives, including their means and skills, their norms and values, as well as their institutions and rights. - cos.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/43/3-5/317

Cultural Preservation Reconsidered: The case of Canadian aboriginal art 
B.R. Sharma, Singapore Polytechnic College, Singapore 
Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 19, No. 1, 53-61 (1999) © 1999 SAGE Publications
Hybrid art forms are emerging more than ever now that advances in global communication link the world's societies. James Clifford, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Valerie Dominguez and other eminent scholars champion such hybrid culture. They argue that it leads to greater acceptance of others and otherness, and destroys notions of 'others' as aesthetically unsophisticated. While there is merit in such claims, this article sheds a different light on the nature of hybrid culture. It argues that in some instances, such culture is the by-product of cultural imperialism - first-world socio-economic and cultural policies imposed on 'Second' and 'Third World' communities. The article concentrates on the dichotomy between native Canadian and Anglo-American Canadian mass culture and adopts Minh-Ha's claim that a First World and a Third World can exist in the same country. - coa.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/19/1/53

INTELLIGENZIA BETWEEN CLASSIC AND MASS CULTURE
Boris Dubin, Russian Centre for Public Opinion and Market Research (VTsIOM)
Abstract:
1. During the latest years the so-called thick literary magazines and newspapers with a similar profile have actively criticized mass culture . At the same time, one can hear calls about the necessity of keeping intact the legacy of high culture, as represented by the Bolshoi Theater and the Russian Museum. These tendencies represent the result of long-term social and cultural processes.
2. The authority of intelligentsia as a group representing exemplary cultural patterns (including what is usually understood by civilization as well as high art) had much to do in the Soviet society with the process of modernization – the speeding up of urban life, education and the cultural revolution. Beginning in the 1930th, the promotion by the intelligentsia of the classics of Russian culture supported, on the one hand, the ideological myth of the party-state according to which the Soviet state was the heir to the best traditions of the past; on the other hand, the intelligentsia’s belief that the classics represented eternal values and that the role of the intelligentsia was to make them accessible to the masses. This complex of ideas served as the foundation for the education of these masses and represented the essence of the Soviet School. Seen in this light, the controversies among the different groups of Soviet intelligentsia (state employees, internal émigrés, liberal dissidents, or nationalist-minded opposition) may be seen as a contest not only for a dominant interpretation of the classics but also for the domination of the School, for the opportunity to shape mass education.
3. The Soviet system, its model of development, and more specifically, its educational institutions and intelligentsia have exhausted possibilities for development and self-reproduction. Studies have shown that that in reality the classics’ share in the reading repertoire of the allegedly "the most reading country in the world" was very modest. In 1980s, the books written before the revolution of 1917 could be found in only 25% of homes with books. The names of the main classics of Russian literature were important only for the new collectors of books, namely those who aimed to purchase editions of collected works in short supply. High school and college students, children of the same book culture recruits, formed another significant segment among the classics consumers. 
4. In 1990s, classical authors yield in popularity to various hits and detective novels, romances, history and memoir literature. A similar phenomenon can be observed in the preferences among viewers of film and TV: they prefer popular thrillers, romances and soap operas, historical films comedies as well as old soviet movies. For the present, we have stable structure of mass behavior among the readers and viewers as well as consumers of goods and in the area of political preferences. These preferences are well-formed, legitimated and acknowledged. If before the main factor for audience stratification was education, the key factors today are age and sex.
5. In modern Russia, mass culture is diffused through and by mass-media, especially television foreign models and patterns predominate. The values and models of behavior disseminated by the mass media in Russia are those of success, family, human emotions, solidarity in the struggle against obstacles, romance. These ideas are conditioned by the notions of a stable society, the importance of the here and now, the gratification achieved today. Not only the plot and the main protagonists are important for the consumers of these cultural products, but also the semantic background of the action, the setting: its milieu, the fabric and habits of everyday life, the modes of inter-personal communication.
6. Mass culture, especially its foreign patterns, possesses its own idea of what constitutes an individual. This is a person who is ready to live and behave "like everybody else" (the imagined majority ) and who also distinguishes himself from socially contiguous minority and resists alien mass culture, though not because he values or has access to high culture (Enlightenment), but rather, because he needs to affirm his own self and establish himself within the framework of the prevalent, normative behavior.
7. In today’s Russia, mass culture is rejected by social groups who, in the process of disintegration of the Soviet system, are losing their authority and dominant position as the carriers of culture. Their claim is that mass culture is of low quality, that its significance is limited merely to entertaining, that it is not serious, that exposure to it makes people torpid and leads society to degradation, that its basis is the power of money, a Western notion, alien to the Russian culture. These groups are opposed to the civilizing of everyday life by which the masses adapt themselves to the reforms, they wish to keep modernity at a distance, to conserve cultural patterns emblematic of the past, and often resort to the defensive mechanisms of xenophobia. It is not the cultural elite but yesterday establishment that is trying to set itself against the masses. - stanford.edu/group/Russia20/dubin.htm

Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (1957) editors, Mass Culture (Glencoe, Ill. The Free Press.)

Meaning of Mass Culture and Bohemianization of Mass Culture