The term popular culture was fashioned after the popular art movement which took place in the US and Great Britain in the 1950s. The movement was a reaction against expressionism which emphasised forms in themselves rather than realistic representation of reality. Popular culture artists used satire in their work.
Popular culture artists depicted reality that common masses faced in their everyday life. Popular culture appealed to the masses as it was for everyone and not just for the elite class.
POPULAR CULTURE AND MASS CULTURE
With the dawn of industrialisation, mass culture was mass manufactured and mass produced. Mass Culture is the culture that is tailored according to the taste of mass audiences. Popular culture is a positive term for mass produced or mass disseminated cultural products.
Scholars have agreed that mass culture and popular culture are terms which are used interchangeably. However, popular culture refers to a culture which is shared, accepted and liked by the people. It is not the culture of the elite.
Mass culture is a culture which cuts across and includes a range of social classes and groups.
CIRCUIT OF CULTURE
Stuart Hall and his colleagues discussed the 'circuit of culture ' and the articulation of production and consumption.
Hall suggested that political economy in some ways structures encoding and decoding of media objects. Media culture is produced within an industrial organisation of production. Here products generated according to codes and models were accepted within industries.
According to Hall, certain cultural codes are so widely circulated and integrated into mainstream culture that they get 'naturalised' in society. Thus the encoders message is put forward and the people decode cultural meaning to it through their own experiences and local culture. (An ideal e.g. In today's india is the 'Kala Chashma' song).
Thus we see that culture is a description of a particular way of life and expresses meaning and values. There is a continuous process of cultural encoding and distribution. The way culture is produced and circulated is decided by the audience and controlled by advertising, marketing and design. The way things are represented affect our understanding of them and how they are shared with others. It also helps us understand how media culture is produced, circulated and distributed.
IMPACT OF POPULAR CULTURE ON SOCIETY
Popular culture includes the beliefs, practices and objects that are a part of everyday tradition. It includes mass produced culture such as popular music, films, mass marketed books and magazines, large circulation newspapers, etc.
Media defines popular culture through movies, billboards, TV channels, fashion magazines, bloggers, etc. Media constantly tells people what the current trends are, what they should wear, what they should look like, how they should behave, what music they should listen to, etc.
Popular culture has a both positive and negative impact.
Positive contribution is seen when popular culture helps to establish social boundaries. For e.g. Music concerts bring social solidarity among people irrespective of their religion, class, caste, social status, etc. They share a common identity through the music even though they are strangers to each other.
On the other hand, popular culture through media tends to bombard our senses from all sides. This people try to follow what they see on TV or on billboards, in magazines or hear on radio and sometimes challenge social norms. This could lead to negative impact.
Thus popular culture plays a significant role in the formation of public attitudes and values and also plays an important role in shaping the patterns of consumption in contemporary society.
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