Week 3 & 4
Pop Culture & Culture Industry
Week 3 & 4: Pop Culture and Culture Industry
Pop and the Culture Industry
In the work 'Cultural Theory and Popular Culture,' John Story describes Culture and
Popular Culture as 'works and practices of intellectual and creative activity, texts and
practices whose main role is to represent, create or be an opportunity for meaning
development.
Week 3 & 4: Pop Culture and Culture Industry
Pop and the Culture Industry
This Concept of Culture is synonymous with what structuralists and post-structuralists
call 'important practices,' or pop culture, will enable us to talk as examples of culture
about soap opera, pop music, and comics. Typically these are referred to as documents.
Week 3 & 4: Pop Culture and Culture Industry
Pop and the Culture Industry
Popular culture is further broken down into six subdefinitions:
The first is culture that is popular or valued by others by measurable means, such as sales
of songs, playing on the radio, attending screenings or concerts, and ratings of viewers on
TV shows.
Week 3 & 4: Pop Culture and Culture Industry
Pop and the Culture Industry
The second subdefinition of culture is culture that is not high culture, for example, culture
seen in a gallery is high culture, this category would include all art and media that are not
regarded as 'cultural' in other cultures. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu notes that the cultural
concept of non-high culture serves as a symbol of social and economic status, although
the distinction for this classification is a little blurred in contemporary times, for example
artist Banksy would fall into this category, but his works have now made it into some of
the best galleries for sale to the 'high society.'
Week 3 & 4: Pop Culture and Culture Industry
Pop and the Culture Industry
Popular Culture's third term is consumer culture, and consumer is the key word in this
concept as it refers to the majority of society, and this culture is mass production and
consumption.
Week 3 & 4: Pop Culture and Culture Industry
Pop and the Culture Industry
The fourth sub-definition of culture is people's culture, identified as people's or working
class' authentic culture, in the past also known as 'folk culture.' Rock or punk bands may
be described as making people's authentic art under this category.
Week 3 & 4: Pop Culture and Culture Industry
Pop and the Culture Industry
Community in fifth group is Supremacy. This is characterized as a culture that uses the
site of struggle between the lower economic and social class to those of a much higher
social and economic demographic or a compromise area between the two, where the
dominant, subordinate and oppositional cultural meaning is mixed depending on what
message they express in the society.
Week 3 & 4: Pop Culture and Culture Industry
Pop and the Culture Industry
The sixth category of culture refers to Postmodernism and this is characterized as culture
that no longer sees the difference between high and low art, some celebrating the end of
high art, and the other divide is desperate by the achievement of trade over culture.
Week 3 & 4: Pop Culture and Culture Industry
Culture industry
The critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973)
coined the word culture industry (Deutsch: Kulturindustrie);
In the chapter "The Cultural Industry: Enlightenment as a Mass Illusion," from the book
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), it was described as a critical vocabulary.
Week 3 & 4: Pop Culture and Culture Industry
Culture industry
popular culture imitate a factory that produces uniform cultural goods — films, radio,
magazines, etc. –which are used to exploit passivity in mass society.
Consumption of the simple pleasures of popular culture, made accessible through the
mass media, makes people docile and happy, no matter how complicated their economic
circumstances may be.
1. Orthentix;
https://medium.com/@orthentix/ Reference/s and Supplementary Material/s
critical-inquiry-ddce4d1897fa;
March 30, 2020
2. Wikipedia;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult Online Supplementary Reading Material/s
ure_industry; March 30, 2020
