Pop Culture NOtes PDF

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Introduction to Pop Culture and Sociology -

What is Sociology? -

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A Sociological Perspective -

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Looks for/at social patterns in the social world, social institutions and social interactions Sociology Imagination (C.Wright Mills): make the connection between how society works and our personal lives - Example: Priviledge, shared experience, difference - In Class Example: First Date - Recognize the personal is the political (Same Sex Marriage, Abortion) - See both the past and the present

Allows us to see the strange in the familiar. E.g. Walking late night - Giving up the idea that human behaviour is simply a matter of what people decide to do - Understand that society shapes our decisions We see individuality in social context Social experiences can shape how we understand others - E.g. Many cases of women being kidnapped and raped allows us to understand why women take precaution with men

What is Culture? - A system of shared beliefs, values, customs and

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behaviours we use to negotiate the world around us. Often these elements are passed down generationally Ray Williams: - a) a particular way of life of a group or people - b) artistic critical work producing meaning

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4 Characteristics of Culture -

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1) Culture is learned 2) Culture is rooted in symbols: physically, vocal and gestural signs that have arbitrary, socially learned meaning. E.g. Stop Sign (Red Octagon) 3) Culture is shared 4) Culture is integrated within itself: that is 1, 2 and 3 must be present for a culture to be whole

Types of Culture -

Low Culture: traditionally considered as an opposite to high culture - A line in the sand is drawn: “this is good, this is bad” - The Binary: opposition

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Low culture is marked by sameness, easiness and predictability - E.g. Romantic Comedies or Trap Music High Culture: historically seen as good, valuable and important, recognized as a part of civilized living, enlightenment, intellect, critical thought - Artifacts we consider “work of arts”: Opera/Jazz Music, Shakespeare, TS Elliot

Socialization - We socialize with each other and popular culture everyday - The process where we learn the culture characteristics that come to define us - This permits us to be connected in social relationships, enables us to make sense of the world

Symbolic Interaction Theory -

We live in a world of symbols, attaching “meaning” to virtually everything, from the appearance of the people to the wink of an eye “Reality” therefore is simply how we define and construct our surroundings, our obligations toward others, and even our own identities

Structural Organization -

The way pop culture is structured affects the way presented or represented information is structured Two key terms used to address this presentation: - 1) Agenda Setting: the process by which the issues - the agenda - are set up to direct the audience into perceiving these issues to be the most important - 2) Gatekeeping: the process of controlling what gets included and whose voices are heard in media. For example, who has power in Hollywood, who dictates direction of an advertisement, or whose perspective heard on news. - In Class Example: Big Bang Theory HR Department Manager (black women)

Introducing Critical Theory -

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Sociological, Cultural and Media Theories are used to explain different phenomena and dimensions of the society They help us: - a) understand different social phenomena by describing, exploring and explaining their different aspects - b) theories help us analyze the ideology, production and consumption of media culture (advertising)

Ideology

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Are made up of group of ideas - These ideas are then made normal and natural by the dominant class. E.g. dominant and mainstream culture - For example: the social and cultural mainstream, Hollywood, Capitalism, Nationalism, Corporation. E.g. Powerful and Influential Entities like Nike - For Karl Marx, “ideologies may become natural enough to the point of invisibility, become common sense, or reflect “a way of life”

Hegemony -

a) draws connection between culture, power and ideology and protects or maintains ideology b) employs a system of coercion and consent in order to create a passivity in the people in which we come to agree with a dominant culture and ideology c) the ideology is often made to “seem normal or rational” d) hegemony is exercised through popular culture and it’s normalizing of presumed norms and expectations

Structural Functionalist Theory -

The social world, like popular culture is structured so as to function smoothly E.g. Our behaviour is governed by relatively stable social relations or structures which rest upon shared values or preferences (morals bind people together) Structural Functionalist identifies the various structures of society - religion, family, education, laws, Hollywood, popular culture and advertising - and describes the functions the structure performs to maintain the entire social system

Social Conflicts Theory -

Views society and popular culture as arenas of inequality that generate conflict and change - Both are structured in ways to benefit a small minority - Factors such as ethnicity, race, sex, class, age are linked to each other in terms of social inequality - Social Conflicts Theory examines inequalities in both the social and popular culture

Function and Variation -

Robert Merton enhances the functionalist perspective by noting that there are three different types of functions that any structure can produce - 1) Manifest Function: intended and easily recognized - 2) Latent Function: unintended - 3) Latent Dysfunction: unintended and produce socially negative consequences

The Culture Industry Thesis -

Theorodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer: - The rise of the Culture Industry - Hollywood etc. - resulted in the standardization

and rationalization of popular and predictable entertainment products Those in power controlled the production of entertainment products that spoke to the general audience, were relatable, understandable and spoke to dominant “tastes” in doing so ensure profitability Pop Culture is recognized by 3 characteristics: - 1) Standardization: - An system of cultural production with a built in audience response system marked by predictable conflicts, outcomes, moments of tears or fear etc. - We love to see tamil actors struggling in movies but we love it more when they see success and defeat the enemy - 2) Commodification: - Popular entertainment - and entertainers - came to act as commodities complete with a host of external components such as marketing tie-ins - We want the things we see our idols and role models wear - 3) Pesudo-Individualization: - Genres, now so closely aligned and redundant - rely on the illusion of individuality - While there are differences in film, these differences amount to merely a pseudo-individualism that serves to mask the fact that the style and form of the film is identical to all others - Ultimately, these “differences” simply mask the fundamental uniformity of all its products - E.g. In tamil movies usually the guy falls for a girl but if the movie portrays the girl wants the guy (Anjaan) it’s different but still the same in the sense that the guy always gets the good looking girl -

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Section 2: Audience and Reception Popular Culture -

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A simple way of defining popular entertainment suggest that it’s the culture left over after what’s been decided what is high - or critical - culture Popular Entertainment: - A residual category, present to accommodate texts and practices that fail to meet the required standards to qualify as high - or critical - culture - In other words, popular culture is an inferior culture - Post-2000s conflict: NBC’s Must see TV of the 90s versus HBO’s It’s Not Television of the 2000s Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinctions: - Argues that cultural distinctions of the kind - NBC vs HBO - are used to support class based distinctions - Taste: - A formal term and a deeply ideological category: taste functions as a marker of “class” in a double sense to mean both a social economic

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category and the suggestion of a particular level of quality For Bourdieu (1984), the consumption of entertainment culture is “predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences”

Cultural Studies -

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For John Story, - 1) Cultural studies involves scrutinizing “the culture phenomenon of a text and drawing conclusions about the changes in textual phenomena over time” - 2) Cultural studies is politically engaged - For example, cultural critics mau see themselves as “in opposition” to dominant codes or models reflected in the Entertainment Industry - 3) Cultural studies denies the separation of “high” and “low” or elite and popular (mass) culture Finally cultural studies also analyzes “not only the cultural work but also the “means of production” Why and how cultural texts produced and for whom? Cultural studies joins subjectivity - that is, culture in relation to individual lives - with engagement, an approach to addressing social issues often obscured within popular culture

Filmic Identification -

Identification is necessary for understanding The subject (spectator) gives meaning to the object (filmic image) The spectator is the one who makes sense of the images on the screen, and the spectators relation to the image is what gives the narrative a meaning Jacques Lacan’s Mirror Stage: - A moment of identification in which a child starts to develop the notion of the ego and recognizing the self in the mirror and then again later on the screen

Spectatorship Theory -

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1) A spectator is an individual member of an audience 2) Spectatorship is an important concept in film theory in terms of its relationship to audience and interpretation 3) Rather than being concerned with media or special effects, spectatorship study focuses on “understanding the ways films produce pleasure in their viewers” Active vs Passive Spectatorship: - A fundamental debates in Popular Culture Theory is: - 1) whether audiences are made up of individual active spectators - 2) a passive mass of unthinking consumers who simply watch and consume the basic or obvious messages translated by popular culture - Active spectatorship theory suggest eah viewer is different and many people in the audience will question the film and react to it different ways to others, not just

blindly accepting tre messages

Stuart Hall’s Reception Theory (1980) -

Reception theory states that cultural texts - films, television, advertisements, brands are encoded by the producer of the text and are loaded with values and messages The text is then decoded by spectators in possibly different ways, and perhaps not in the way the producer intended Three forms: - 1) Dominant (Preferred Reading): the viewer is in agreement with the dominant or obvious meaning system operating within the cultural text. E.g. Will wear a face mask and doesn’t care if posted on gf’s story - 2) Oppositional Reading: the viewer rejects the preferred reading as a result of his/her interpretation an may create a new meaning for the specific text. E.g. Rejects wearing the face mask because it isn’t manly - 3) Negotiated Reading: a compromise between the dominant and oppositional readings in which the viewer accepts part of the dominant meaning but rejects elements as well. E.g. I’ll wear a face mask but just don’t post on your story babe because what if my boys see

Polysemy and the Cultural Text -

Polysemy: reflects a form of interpretation and is defined as: - “The meaning of a text id fluid wherein the viewer, reader or listener may interpret a text with a personal and social associations at work”

Polysemy & Spectatorship -

Janet Staiger’s Perverse Spectators (2000) examines spectatorship and reception theory in terms of a passive and active audience and references Tom Gunning’s “Cinema of Attractions” theory: - Thesis: shock factor is part of the whole viewing experience - Causality: this shock effect can cause confrontation and participation in the spectators, as opposed to classical narrative cinema where our only requirement is to be absorbed into the illusion - Basic Instinct - Staiger argues:

Character A: she is being interrogated in for murder Character B, C, D, E, F: male police officers interrogating her

Discourse -

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a) explains how language use is subject to a social boundary defining what can be said about a specific topic b) reflects how language is constricted

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and why For example: Free Speech vs Hate Speech Judith Butler calls discourse “reflects the limit of acceptable speech”

Linguistics -

The study of this language use is discourse and separates into three areas - 1) Form/Sentence Structure: - 2) Language/Word Meaning: “Basic Instinct”: “Fucking instead of making love” - 3) Language in Context/Social Meaning: - Linguistics may operate to protect ideology e.g. as hegemony - E.g. Jeremy Lin “Chink in the Armor”

Jerry Seinfeld: tall, neat, thin and in thirty’s (gay representation/stereotypes)

Section 3: Representations of Class in Pop Culture Introducing: Class and Representation - C.Wright Mills -

Sociological Imagination: drawing connections between our lives and the lives of others E.g. Status Panic: when members of the middle classes come increasingly to depend on the goods they consume to express their claims to social prestige and to enforce their “distinction” (Pierre Bourdieu)

Representing Class -

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Social Cognition: how we process, store and apply information about other people and social situations - the homeless, for example Social representations are considered as “thoughts in movement” developing through communication and interaction and allows us to classify others, to compare and explain behaviours, and to position others. E.g. “he doesn’t belong here” Emile Durkheim’s Collective Representation: - The processes of “collective meaning making resulting in common understanding which produce social bonds uniting societies, organizations and groups. E.g. group of teenage boys wearing Kappa - Common ways of conceiving, thinking about and evaluating social reality - E.g. consider our initial base responses when witnessing homelessness, or the degree to which we engage sports fandom

Types of Representation -

1) Hegemonic Representation (Normal) - Shared by most of the members of a structured group - Canadians - that are uniform and prevail as the norm: terrorists are bad

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2) Emancipated Representation (Abnormal) - Refers to subgroups that create their own representation with a certain degree of autonomy with respect to the interacting segments of society: vegans, subcultural youth groups, radical groups 3) Polemic Representation - Related to social conflicts, struggles between groups, and controversies in a society - Determined by antagonistic relations and intended to be exclusive to that group - E.g. Communism is a capitalist country, or cultural struggles or debate in restrictive societies

Part 2: Class and Entertainment -

Screening Example: Honey Boo Boo, Distinction of Class - Etiquette: no manners, standing on kitchen counter, throwing spaghetti on cupboards - Eating: Ketchup and butter, roadkill - Price: Spending $8 a week - Language: assuming non educated for saying ghetti instead of spaghetti

Media Framing Theory -

Emphasizes the power of media in shaping perceptions of difference. E.g. economic difference and poverty The basic idea of each theory argues, “media tells us what to think about a particular issue” Erving Goffman (1974) - “How a story is told influences how an audience will understand or evaluate the given information”

Moral Panic -

Folk Devils and Moral Panic (Stan Cohen, 1975) - a) a condition, episode or group which emerges to become defined as a threat to social values and interests - b) this threat is then stylized by media in order to stand out and certain behaviors or practices are constructed as warning signs - E.g. 9/11 - a) threat to social values - b) Muslims are now considered as terrorists and dangerous

Poverty and The Under Class -

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Pop culture is marked by a tendency to position lower classes - economically, politically, and ideologically - as “a class in stagnation” Viewed up as excessive, tasteless, with disgust and as source of humour or mockery. E.g. Honey Boo Boo, we all laughed and were disgusted with Ketchup and Butter These cultural texts also use one’s inexperience with middle class lifestyles as a

source of humour, as a way to signal their economic and cultural difference

Habitus -

Class belonging is examined through the myriad structures of everyday life that help shape “living life” as a complex construct that considers both socioeconomic as well as the less tangible elements of culture that mark one’s class habitus (Bourdieu, 1984) - Definition: - A set of acquired modes of understanding, perception and experience which signal everyday lived experiences such as language, habits, rituals and consumption - E.g. Rappers not allowed to or don’t want to talk to cops (snitch if you do) - Clip 1: American Psycho - Specific shower products: eardment facial mask, concerned about alcohol in shaving product - High class: says words like negative rather than no - Mineral water - Concerned about being perceived as the rich kid who didnt work for anything in life - “Dick sizes” with the business cards (one of them had waterprint) Ideology - Hates job but wants to fit in so is in that job

Section 4: Youth and Pop Culture Cultural Studies & Subcultures -

Douglas Kellner, Angela McRobbie et al On Subcultures: - To understand subcultural identity in postmodernity (1960 >) requires “a recognition of the multiple ways in which pop culture is pivotal to how our identities are defined, constructed, contested and reconstituted

Youth & Subcultures -

Subcultural Media and the Discourses of Authenticity (Barbara Wheaton) - In the age of “lifestyle branding” we examine how youth culture experiences the commercialization, commodification and institutionalization of their culture. E.g. Skateboarding - Commercialization: sales are over a million a year - Commodification: we don’t ride skateboards but we still buy

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skateboarding shoes like Vans - It becomes a norm within society. E.g. Everyone wearing Thrasher shirts The symbolic consumption of subculture-based brands suggests we consume the meaning & establish sociocultural values. E.g. the importance of “authenticity”

Dick Hebdige -

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In a romanticized figuration, this authenticity suggests that subcultures can resist and struggle with the corporate world: for example the “authentic class-based rebellion of 1970/80’s skateboarding culture and so-called “sell out” culture” As skateboarding became corporatized, middle class and mainstream, a pseudorebellion marked by deviant social behavior replaced its turer incarnation marked as a lived deviant experience rather than a performed one

Subculture as Cultural Field -

Cultural Field: a structured system of social positions occupied by either individuals or institutions engafef in the same activity Bourdieu: “In...