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As media becomes a platform for debates and discussions, Navodita analyses what ‘mass’ and ‘culture’ mean in ‘mass culture’. An exclusive for Different Truths.
The understanding of this ‘mass culture’ depends on our point of view and on what ‘culture’ means to us. Thus the term ‘mass culture’ can be used pejoratively or positively
However, along with this, ‘globalisation’ has become even more relevant due to social media and the Internet bridging cultures and distances. There is a certain culture born with it. The understanding of this ‘mass culture’ depends on our point of view and on what ‘culture’ means to us. Thus the term ‘mass culture’ can be used pejoratively or positively. The ‘mass’ is the rabble, the uncouth, illiterate and uncultured lot; the ‘mass’ is also vast, homogenous, scattered, anonymous. But from a positive perspective, the mass is volatile, dynamic, revolutionary; what Carl Sandburg in his poem, ‘The People, Yes’, termed the ‘teeming, seething mass’.
The concept of ‘mass culture’ (popularised by neo-Marxist social theorists of the Frankfurt School) refers to a whole range of popular activities and artefacts- to entertainments, spectacles, music, books, comics, films — but it has become identified with the typical content of the mass media, and especially with the fictional, dramatic and entertainment material which they provide. So ‘mass culture’ according to this, has little reference to the culture of the masses, that is the vast general population of a nation. It primarily refers to the ‘content’ of radio, TV, cinema and the press. What then is the relationship between this ‘mass culture’ of the media and the people’s own cultures?
The reach of the mass media is so limited in India that one wonders what relevance Denis McQuail’s description of mass culture has to our society. ‘Mass’ culture in our country is still by and large the one that prevails in our villages where over 70% of our people live
The reach of the mass media is so limited in India that one wonders what relevance Denis McQuail’s description of mass culture has to our society. ‘Mass’
The Indian cinema has the qualities of a mass culture product and often gives rise to a ‘mass culture’ among the general population. As understood by western sociologists, mass culture has three main features:
- Immense popularity among all classes, but particularly among the working class in industrial societies
- Mass production and mass distribution
- Unlike ‘elite’ or high culture it aesthetic and literary standards are low, and commercialised, as its mass produced programmes aim at the mass market
A more balanced approach to the more popular forms of various cultures, would make for a more realistic evaluation of the relationship between the mass media and popular culture.
A more balanced approach to the more popular forms of various cultures, would make for a more realistic evaluation of the relationship between the mass media and popular culture. Do television audiences, for instance, watch a soap opera or a sitcom as a ‘mass’ or rather as members of a cultural community, in terms of what James Lull calls ‘intepretative communities’? Theorists of mass culture (like those of Frankfurt School) assumed that audiences were passive absorbers of media messages; ethnographic and qualitative research since the mid-1980s suggests otherwise, that audiences often negotiate, resist and even poach the texts that they read; far from being ‘dupes’, audiences ‘appropriate’ the messages in terms of their own experiences and cultures and interests. This proves even more true in today’s era of social media where interests and cultures are engaged across common platforms — the Internet.
This is evident in major social and political exercises in various countries- elections recently in the U.K. have been affected by the votes of immigrant communities and especially those from Asia. Cultures are getting transferred through the internet and that is the reality. As racial identities get redefined, even cultural identities are getting a new definition with ‘global citizen’ being the new identity. The sooner we realise this, the better.
Photo from the Internet