Popular culture as global culture



CHYS 4P16 October 8th, 2010

Handout

Popular Culture as Global culture

Key terms:

• “Mediagraphy” (Rantanen, 2005); how people interconnect through media and communication

• Time –space compression; the way the world appears to be shrinking due to the influence of new electronic media (Storey, 2003).

• Globalization; describes a process by which regional societies, and cultures have become integrated through a global network of communication, transportation, and trade (Wajima, 2005).

• Popular culture; is the ideas, perspectives, attitudes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred within the mainstream of a given culture (Reid, 2007).

• Deterritorialization; the division of social, political, or cultural practices from their native places and populations (Rantanen, 2005). Saldanha (2002), describes deterritorialization as a dynamic, changing set of interconnected entities with blurred boundaries.

• Hybridization; Kahn and Kellner (2004), describe it as the fusing, mixing, intermingling, combining, fusion of cultural forms. Park and Thelwall (2006), describe this term as humanity becoming completely dependent on technology. As becoming one with the technological advances. For example, the cell phone has become apart of us, or for those that literally need technology to survive such as; pacemakers. We are part human and part technology.

• Homogenizing forces; Storey (2003), looks at homogenizing as “the reduction of the world to an American ‘global village’” (Storey, 2003). This means everyone one is the same, they all speak the same, eat the same things and enjoy the same things.

• Heterogenizing forces; stipulates that global flows of communication are multidimensional and reinforce regional/local identities (Storey, 2003).

Popular Culture as Global Culture

-John Storey

Globalization, as Neumayer and Raffl (2008) describe it, especially in Western culture as being heavily influenced by mass media. This collection of ideas permeates the everyday lives of the society, the ways in which we carry ourselves and refer to one another.

Therefore, globalization can be best understood as a set of reinforcing changes which are occurring simultaneously through intervals of time. Globalization can be examined in six different components

• Changing concepts of space and time

• An increasing volume of cultural interactions

• The commonality of problems facing all the world’s inhabitants

• Growing interconnections and interdependencies

• A network of increasingly powerful transnational actors and organization

• The organization of all the dimensions involved in globalization

(Wajima, 2005).

-In groups come up with an example for each (eg. ideologies of what is beautiful)

Popular culture is perhaps too broad, however, it mixes up two different types of cultural objects; produced by the ‘people’ and the production for popular consumption. Popular culture is the original ideal of a collective group consciousness. The rapid pace of popular culture reminds us that traditions evolve. Popular culture is not static and that culture is always changing in relationship to historical contexts (Reid, 2007).

Popular culture is the culture for mass consumption;

• The socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought

• These patterns, traits, and products are the expression of a particular period, class, community, or population

• The predominating attitudes and behaviour that characterize the functioning of a group or organization

• Enlightenment resulting from training or education

• Special training and development: culture for singers and actors

-Why then, does popular culture go hand in hand with globalization?

“We encounter the global in the clothes we wear, the music we listen to, the television programs and films we watch” (Storey, 2003)

-Discuss and activity

“This is not to deny power but to insist that politics in which ordinary people are seen as mute and passive victims of a process they can never hope to understand, a politics which denies agency to the vast majority” (Storey, 2003)

-Discussion questions

Wajima (2005) states that; “Countries tend to borrow other countries’ culture without knowing its meanings”

-relate to the quote above

Home Musical Environment of Children in Singapore On Globalization

- Lum, Chee-Hoo

“Children learn much from popular culture's cultural pedagogy, which is a direct product of globalization that is indebted to the proliferation of technology” (Chee-Hoo, 2008).

-Unpack this quote. What do you think it means? Connect it to other readings.

In Chee-Hoo’s (2008), article she addresses five scapes that are the essence that influences values, viewpoints of children and adults. Ethnoscape; is the shifting landscape of the world in which we live. Technoscape; explains distribution of technologies, both mechanical and informational. Finanscape; looks at the movement of money. Mediascape; describes the distribution of the electronic capabilities and its ability to disseminate and construct information. Mediascape also refers to the images that make up the media. Ideoscape; symbolizes images which are directly political and deal with counter-ideologies of movement and state of power (Chee-Hoo, 2008).

-Discuss

“The purpose of this ethnographic study is to examine the home musical environment of a group of first-grade children living in Singapore to determine media and technological influences as they impact upon musical influences in their daily lives” (Chee-Hoo, 2008).

-Discussion questions

Cultural synchronization: people can belong to a number of cultures simultaneously, “Modernization and globalization have not led to the destruction of tradition. Indeed, modern technology has been used to preserve tradition” (Wall, 2007).

-Discuss

-Allyshia Green

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