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 andEarth 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

• 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• 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.

• 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 individualsread and view texts in creative ways-often unanticipated byculture producers.

Postmodernists take a different approach and assert that thereis no reality anymore: reality has given way to simulation ofreality, or “hyperreality”. Our current condition is one ofsimulation. In all dimensions of our social and cultural life , thesimulated experience has come to be preferred to the “real”.

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