Class 6: Mass Culture/ Consumer Culture · Entertainment, cultural consumerism vs. cultural production by the masses/ ordinary people themselves - products from two different sides . Different mechanism of the market and social functions · Mass culture - low artistic quality, junk, quantity rather than quality, social criticism, moral improvement, entertainment and shows An urban setting i.e. the 'masses' o A modern phenomenon o Linked with urbanisation and industrialisation o Burke: · (1) Media criticism i.e. print, visual, performing, arts · Ahistorical - analyses the mass media/ communication studies · Different popular media - writing and reading at the centre of media culture · Audio and print, for example, are very different · (2) The society in which popular culture takes on functions · Marxist view - brings society back in the social and cultural process e.g. E. P. Thompson · Includes the workplace, not just leisure activities · Active process of negotiating social hierarchies · Arena to fight out conflict e.g. bourgeois ideals vs. traditional views · Lacks historical development/ background of popular culture " (fl) Transition processes - how does it develop? i.e. Annales school of France · The emergence of popular culture · What does it mean? . Robert Mandrou, Popular Culture in the 17th and 18th Centuries . No breakdown between classes (popular culture is not specific to sociological categories) . R. Chartier - looked at the reworkings of texts · Distinctions between high and low culture disappeared Opera is an elite art, but once it came out, everyone was singing it in the streets - no clear-cut line between high and low culture
· Popular culture How do we read visual sources as a historian? E.g. posters, films, TV commercials o How do we analyse and make sense of popular culture? o What can we learn from it? . No clear answers to the causality of history !! - no direct, linear causation " We can get closer to the paradigms in people's minds · Better understanding of what influenced people . We can learn about: aesthetic conventions, ideological trends, fashions, worldviews " Broad view of popular culture enables a larger net to pick up on the messages which popular culture sent · Popular culture as a barometer of society People usually paid for entertainment and artefacts out of their free will Sellers had to constantly meet the demand of the consumers The history of popular culture is not as regulated as other areas of history e.g. diplomatic history o Absence of one generally applied method - experimentation with various, unconventional sources e.g. art history, music . Not usually based in an archive (maybe a police archive where you can find the repercussions of the behaviour at an event e.g. fairground) · Written and visual material not found in a regular/ state archive e.g. music on gramophones · Russia around 1900 Increase in urbanisation meant an increase in consumer marketplace which included everyone in the cities and increasingly people in the countryside Traditional and new