Popular Culture - an Introduction

 "What exactly is 'Popular Culture?'" you might ask if you were to fall upon my humble blog and perchance glance across the title of its first entry. Hungry for a definition, mildly interested, or perhaps just searching for a way to pass the time while Modern Family takes a commercial break, your eyes might skim down the page trying to find a clarification or two. Well, if this were the case, you would be a bit out of luck –for now, that is. Popular Culture is a bit tricky; In fact, in the past few days I haven’t been able to wrap my mind around an all-encompassing definition that does justice to something so amorphous yet pervasive as Popular Culture. But, as the next few weeks go by (and as this blog gets more awesome looking), I do hope to hope to sharpen my understanding of Popular Culture. If things go really well, maybe Wikipedia will be boasting a new author on its Popular Culture page.

So, where to begin? In its broadest sense, Popular Culture is concerned with what society consumes on a day-to-day basis: things that we like to watch on TV and in the movies, what we like to listen to and what we eat, the brands we choose to wear and the cars we choose to ride in. Additionally, the study popular culture attempts to take those choices glean our values and preferences as a society from them. But this too is a large number of things to tackle in with one definition, and because of this, certain scholars have taken a shot at defining popular culture further by attempting to dissect it into two branches: High Culture and Low Culture. 

Culture from above, or high context culture, can be viewed as that which is deemed to be 'art' by those in the dominant economic classes, whereas low context culture is the lifeblood of the lower and working classes. To put it in a modern perspective, knowing that non-blended Chilean Sauvignon Blancs are much less acidic than their New Zealand counterparts, or having an appreciation for both Vivaldi and Stan Getz, or perhaps just being able to definitively know that Paul Cézanne was really the best artist of the 1800s (definitely not Monet... ew), could all be tidbits of knowledge taken from a high context culture. In contrast, things such as an ice cold Bud Light™, the latest Blink-182 album, or Justin Bieber's latest hoodie-and-jeans combination would all be darlings culture from below.

Culture from Above:

Culture from Below:

So, it would appear that high context culture decides upon its darlings after years of deliberation and careful thought and critique (maybe there is even a secret rubric involved), while in contrast the lower context cultural objects seem to be organically created and then embraced by the masses. Some authors go as far as to say that those in power play a hand in creating objects of low context culture as a means of keeping the lower classes content and subjugated: “mass culture […] is a tool of domination, a way for capitalism to offer ephemeral gratification to people condemned to lives of work” (Rivkin and Ryan, 1026).If this interests you, check our "The Politics of Culture" by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan.

I find that last part a bit extreme, but nonetheless it is pretty interesting to think about. All this is a lot to swallow for a first bite out of popular culture. But all-in-all, popular culture doesn't taste half bad- especially if it's chilled Chilean Sauvignon Blanc.

Rivkin, Julie, and Machael Ryan, eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Malden: Blackwell, 1998.