The Influence Of Mass Culture

1. Is ‘mass culture’ a contradiction in terms?

Yes, in the end it is. This can be tricky and complicated answer to a short question. So, before anything else, we need to de-construct the question in order to dig deep enough to get a clear answer. Our image of culture has become more complex over time and is now more than ever harder to explain. This leads to a number of important questions about the culture, culture industry, pop culture and anything culture related, to become a challenging topic in the social sciences. Although, sociology may be present as “an oversimplified view of a culture as something integrated, unified, settled and static:” (Featherstone, 2010:13) it’s, in fact, “something relatively

It was first marked by the Frankfurt’s negative and elitist view on the culture industry, arguing between individuality and pseudo-individuality. By High Culture it’s meant to refer to a set of cultural products, mainly in the field of arts, which have their own value and are held in esteem by a culture. It is mainly seen as the culture of the aristocrats or the burgeouse. By contrast, low culture is everything that is consumed by the less educated or the masses, in which category we can put tabloids, reality TV, pop music and others. Popular culture is seen as all the images, attitudes, fashion that happens within the mainstream of a given culture. Cultural specialists are often caught in a difficult relationship with the market and the wider audiences they can reach. “Conditions that favor the autonomization of the cultural sphere will better allow cultural specialists to monopolize, regular and control cultural production and to place art and intellectual pursuits above everyday life.” (Featherstone, 2010: 16) By then culture had grown in size, it became more about media, art, novels – more of everything. Culture ended up being a mass product. Culture extended itself into other areas of popular life, (i.e. politics, wellbeing, morality…) it became tangled and a part of culture also. Everything interacts with everything else. With the predominance of money and technology there is a growth of objective culture and the decline of individual cultural, with this shift, culture becomes a way of making money: it becomes an industry, which follows only its own economic interests. The goal of the culture industry, just like in every industry, is that of an economic nature. All products are created to be an economic success. Activities that are, in no shape of form related to work or industrial work end up being subsumed and put in the same mindset of instrumental rationality and commodity