The Media and Popular Culture
The mass media are diversified media
technologies that are intended to reach a large
audience by mass communication.
The technologies of the mass media:
• Broadcast media (radio, recorded music, film
and television)
• Print media (newspaper, book, pamphlet or
comics)
• Outdoor media (billboards, signs or placards
placed inside and outside of commercial
buildings, sports stadiums, shops and buses)
• Outdoor media,such as flying billboards (signs
in tow of airplanes), blimps, and skywriting
• Public speaking
• Event organising
• The digital media (Internet and mobile mass
communication)
• Internet media (email,websites,blogs, internet
based radio and television)
• Popular culture is the entirety of
ideas,perspectives,attitudes,memes,images,
and other phenomena that are within the
mainstream of a given culture, especially
Western culture of the early to mid 20th
century and the emerging global mainstream
of the late 20th and early 21st century. Heavily
influenced by mass media, this collection of
ideas permeates the everyday livesof the
society.
Media ritual events
Global media events are a special type of cyclical
contemporary event, naturally global, naturally
mediated through new technologies, which
produce their own emotional climate and
emotional dynamics, and have at its core certain
spectacular collective ritual performances.
Events such as the Olympic Games,
New Year's Eve, the Football World Cup,
the American Academy Awards and
Earth Hour have certain common features.
• Within this tradition, ceremonies, media
rituals and media events reinforce a shared
sense of community (Shils and Young,1975
[1956]; Dayan and Katz, 1992)
• create such emotions and meanings (Couldry,
Hepp and Krotz, 2010)
• reinforce “the myth of the media center”
(Couldry, 2008).
• Media events include moments in which social
meanings are highly visible (Durkheim, 2003
[1912]; Shils and Young, 1975 [1956]; Dayan
and Katz,1992)
• Moments in which struggles occur and provide
meaning to the events and to the social realm
(Alexander, 2004)
• Moments in which meaning is created (Turner,
1982; Cottle, 2007).
7 examples of obsession with the
outcomes and effects
• 1) rituals are posited to reinforce social
solidarity and thus society (Durkheim, 2003
[1912]) and to allow anti-structure and also
communitas (V. Turner, 1982)
• 2) social dramas and cultural performances help
to resolve conflicts and restore social order (V.
Turner, 1982; Alexander, 2006)
• 3) ceremonials such as the coronation of
Elizabeth II are a “kind of ceremonial in which
the society reaffirms the moral values which
constitute it as a society and renews its
devotion to those values by an act of
communion” (Shils and Young 1975 [1956]:
140)
• 4) degradation ceremonies “may reinforce
group solidarity” (Garfinkel, 1976 [1956]: 252)
• 5) interaction rituals create social or group
solidarity, emotionally charge individuals,
objects, situations, and spaces, creating sacred
objects, patterns of morality and righteous
anger (Collins, 2004)
• 6) media events create an “epidemic of
communitas” and moments of “mechanical
solidarity” and redefine the boundaries of
society (Dayan and Katz, 1994: 195-8)
• 7) media events celebrate the sacred center of
society, social integration and “renewal of
loyalty to the society and its legitimate
authority” (Dayan and Katz, 1994: 16).
• Media events are social situations in an
attempt to grasp the emotions, cognitive
dynamics and the ritual performances that
occurs within them, together with the
unequal distribution of power and the
situational domination that take place.
Mass culture
• Culture can be defined as the beliefs, values,
or other frameworks of reference by which we
make sense of our experiences. It also
concerns how we communicate these values
and ideas.
Mass media are centrally involved in the
production of modern culture.
The term culture industry was coined by the
critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) and
Max Horkheimer (1895-1973).
They proposed that popular culture is akin to a
factory producing standardized cultural goods —
films, radio, programmes, magazines, etc. — that
are used to manipulate mass society into passivity.
• Mass culture is
“administrated…nonspontaneous, reified, and
phony” (Jay 1973, p.216, as cited by Ritzer 1992,
p.145)
• The “systematic moronization of children and
adults alike” (Marcuse 1964, p.63)
Impact of the media on people
“Imagistic advertising is qualitatively different
from nonimagistic ad, because rather than
lead us to rationally evaluate the price and
quality of a particular product it focuses on
our emotions and conscious and
underconscious desire. Imagistic advertising
compels us to organize our world and place
value via commercial culture products.”
The new media
• New media refers to on-demand access to
content any time, anywhere, on any digital
device, as well as interactive user feedback,
creative participation. Another aspect of new
media is the real-time generation of new,
unregulated content .
New media
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Internet
Multi-media
Videogames
Mobile phones
Social media
Audience reception
The theory of coding and decoding, the theory
of audience recepion of media messages,
developed by Stuart Hall.
• Encoding: The act of producing the message.
Examples: writing, speaking, making a gesture
• Decoding: The act of understanding the
message. Examples: reading, listening,
deciphering a gesture
Hall's Encoding and Decoding model of
communication states that:
-the meaning of the message isn't determined
by the sender
• -the encoder's message isn't transparent
• -the decoder doesn't receive the message
passively
Audience reception
Producers encode specific meanings into text to
say and try to make meaning understood.
The meanings and messages are not simply
transmitted: they are always produced, first by
the encoder, and second by the audience.
Audience reactions
• Dominant/Preferred-the reaction which
director / creator of mediatext prefers the
audience to percept it
• Oppositional-when the audience rejects the
content in the way preferred by director /
creator and creates its own opinion
• Negotiated-a compromise between the
dominant and oppositional reading, when the
public partially perceives thoughts of director,
but in part has its own views on the text.
Postmodern
. ”The modern world
was well-organized
along the history
while the postmodern
world is poorly
organized with the
absence of a clear,
predictable historical
future”
Postmodernism
There is no clear distinction between reality and
illusion anymore.
Reality has given the way to simulation of reality
or “hyper-reality”
Postmodernism
Hyperreality is a way of characterizing what our
consiousness defines as "real" in a world
where a multitude of media can radically
shape and filter an original event or
experience. Hyperreality is seen as a condition
in which what is real and what is fiction are
seamlessly blended together so that there is
no clear distinction between where one ends
and the other begins.
Conclusions
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The media ritual events reaffirm shared meaning
and community, which provide a cultural space in
which complex social issues are displayed and
sorted out.
Recent technologies have potential to create
entirely new types of community (virtual
communities) with the rise of global culture.
The media is sophisticated well-financed industry
that creates and conditions the interpretation of a
limited array of manufactured entertainment
goods.
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Global culture is successful marketing campaign wiping out
individuality, self-expression and freedom
There is two main responses to mass culture theory:
audience/reception studies and postmodernism.
Audience reception researches demonstrate that individuals
read and view texts in creative ways-often unanticipated by
culture producers.
Postmodernists take a different approach and assert that there
is no reality anymore: reality has given way to simulation of
reality, or “hyperreality”. Our current condition is one of
simulation. In all dimensions of our social and cultural life , the
simulated experience has come to be preferred to the “real”.
Thank you for your attention!