How does popular culture evolve from local to national to global culture?
Popular culture is mass culture and is usually generated at the local level. At this stage popular
culture is made up of new ideas that are innovative, raw and edgy. If the new local culture
resonates with a larger group it moves to the next stage. At this stage, the national stage, the
popular culture is subjected to promotion or classification by government or commercial
institutions. National popular cultures evolve as global cultures when the message or image
transcends the local and national boundaries.
Popular culture germinates at the local level. There are many examples of potentially global popular
cultures operating at this level, experimenting, and challenging accepted values and norms. This
stage may be referred to as the compost stage where new popular cultures are invented and old
ideas are reinvented. The American teen movie Rebel Without a Cause began as an academic
research into the behaviour of a deviant teenager, the academic report was titled Rebel Without a
Cause. The idea of finding reasons for teenage deviant behaviour gathered interest and eventually
the screenplay for the movie was written. The compost stage of the teen movie Mean Girls can be
found in the book Queen Bees and Wanna Bees about teenage girls and bullying. The book was
widely read as its message resonated with the American public in the 1990s.
The commercial potential of local or compost cultures propels them to the institutional stage. This
often coincides with national recognition. The popular culture has become institutionalised because
it is at this stage a mass culture for mass consumerism. The particular culture has attained
accessories and merchandise and its jargon has entered mainstream language. It is at this stage
subject to rules and laws from business and government. According to Lovat et al, A New Society and
Culture at this stage popular culture becomes sanitised as a result of classification, regulation or
commercial success. The movie Rebel Without a Cause sanitised the original academic research. The
rebel, Jim Star, is charismatic and although rebellious stands up for honesty and rejects the double
standard of his parents. In Mean Girls the selfishness and cruelty of bullying is sanitised by a witty
screen play. Although both texts began as serious research Hollywood has repackaged the idea as a
commercial product for teenagers.
Global popular cultures are symbols of their time, instantly recognizable and generate from ideas
easily decoded across national boundaries. The cultural beliefs and values that underlie the
production or the text have global relevance. American teen movies have a global audience. The
movies of the 1960s and 1970s followed the boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girls formula.
This message is easily decoded and resonates with teenagers across the world. In the movies of the
1960s and 1970s such as the beach party series and the Elvis travelogue series teenagers are
presented as free, fun loving kids whose life is an endless party punctuated by surfing, water skiing
and car racing. The dreams of teenagers all over the world are packaged and sold back to them in
ways they could not have imagined in these teen movies. (Lovat et al 2000) In the 1980s The
Breakfast Club broke through the teen movie formula and the “brain numbing passivity” of the teen
movie genre (Lovat et al 2000). Five teenagers on detention search for their own identity within the
micro world of the school library. The underlying values of the text, identity, parental expectations
and teen stereotyping crossed national boundaries and became an international cult classic.
The popular culture of movies generally enters society at the institutional level. The cost of
production by public companies such as Warner Brothers and Paramount is very high. Therefore
format and marketing are geared to national and global acceptance in order to make a profit.
More recently a compost or local stage has emerged through short film festivals and youtube films.
This has influenced recent box office hits such as Juno. Juno is relatively small budget film with the
raw and edgy nuance of independent short films. The underlying values of the text, consequences of
behaviour and moral responsibility are easily decoded by a global audience. This teen movie also
avoids the conspicuous consumption and staged ‘glamour’ of other teen movies.
We are living in the age of globalisation, that is, the interconnectedness of our world through
technological advances in communication and transportation. This has led to cultural hegemony, a
blending of national or local cultures with the dominant culture of the only superpower, the USA.
Economic dominance is cultural dominance. American movies that are successful at the institutional
or national level are also successful at the global level. Success is promoted through cross
referencing of other genres of popular culture or cross referencing over time. Rituals such as the
Academy Awards promote global acceptance. Cross referencing with other popular culture genres
and reinterpretation of other popular culture genres add to the collective social understanding and
shared interpretation of the world. “Cultural production is born out of other cultural productions”.
(Lovat et al 2000)